Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of Higher Education: The Just University 1793638268, 9781793638267

Table of contents :
Dedications
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Preface: Dreaming of the Just University in an Age of Crisis • Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss
Introduction: Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of a Just University • Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss
PART 1: THE JUST UNIVERSITY AS INSTRUCTIONAL SPACE
1 The Agon of the Summoned Self in Ricoeur’s Late Philosophy of Religion • Mark I. Wallace
2 Reading Ricoeur Together: Interpretive Work and Surplus Meaning in a Just Pedagogy • Charles A. Gillespie
3 Practical Formation: Teaching Critical Thinking via Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Model • Laura Schmidt Roberts
4 Ricoeur and Transferable Skills • Glenn Whitehouse
5 Fallible Pedagogy: How to Balance Liberation and Evaluation with Compassion • Daniel Boscaljon
6 Oneself as Another and The Argonauts: An Attempt at Interpretive Justice • Richard A. Rosengarten
7 Embodied Pedagogy: Reflections on Becoming Oneself • Verna Marina Ehret
PART 2: THE JUST UNIVERSITY AS A SOCIAL SPACE
8 The Literary Self: Nostalgia, Kenosis, and Interpretation toward a Renewed Vision and Possibility for the Liberal Arts • Jeffrey F. Keuss
9 Teaching and Learning in Just Institutions: A Ricoeurean Institutional Ethic of Higher Education • Michael Le Chevallier
10 Should Religion-Affiliated Institutions Be Accredited? Ricoeur and the Problem of Religious Inclusivity • Nathan Eric Dickman
11 Interpreting with and for Others: Institutional Research as Hermeneutical Reasoning • Kenneth A. Reynhout
12 Memory, History, and the Forgotten: Ricoeur and Access To Higher Education • Vero Rose Smith
13 Doing Time and Narrative: Teaching in (and out of) Prisons with Paul Ricoeur • Howard Pickett
14 Wounded Memory and a Pedagogy of Hope: Engaging Ricoeur within the Context of Conflicting Pasts • Robert Vosloo
Index
Contributors

Citation preview

Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of Higher Education

Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur Series Editors: Greg S. Johnson, Pacific Lutheran University/Oxford University (ELAC), and Dan R. Stiver, Hardin-Simmons University Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur, a series in conjunction with the Society for Ricoeur Studies, aims to generate research on Ricoeur, about whom interest is rapidly growing both nationally (United States and Canada) and internationally. Broadly construed, the series has three interrelated themes. First, we develop the historical connections to and in Ricoeur’s thought. Second, we extend Ricoeur’s dialogue with contemporary thinkers representing a variety of disciplines. Third, we utilize Ricoeur to address future prospects in philosophy and other fields that respond to emerging issues of importance. The series approaches these themes from the belief that Ricoeur’s thought is not just suited to theoretical exchanges, but can and does matter for how we actually engage in the many dimensions that constitute lived existence.

Recent Titles in the Series Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of Higher Education: The Just University, edited by Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body, by Roger W. H. Savage A Companion to Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil, by Scott Davidson Narrative Medicine in Hospice Care: Identity, Practice, and Ethics though the Lens of Paul Ricoeur, by Tara Flanagan A Companion to Ricoeur's Fallible Man, Edited by Scott Davidson Ricoeur's Hermeneutics of Religion: Rebirth of the Capable Self, by Brian Gregor Ideology and Utopia in the Twenty-first Century: The Surplus of Meaning in Ricoeur’s Dialectical Concept, Edited by Stephanie Arel and Dan R. Stiver

Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of Higher Education The Just University

Edited by Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boscaljon, Daniel, editor. | Keuss, Jeffrey F., 1965- editor. Title: Paul Ricoeur and the hope of higher education: the Just University / edited by Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss. Description: Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. | Series: Studies in the thought of Paul Ricoeur | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The stresses of the 21st century have exposed the fault lines in Higher Education, both as an instructional space that facilitates student growth and as a social space that shapes our economic, political, and religious institutions. This book uses Paul Ricoeur’s rigorous writings to envision a Just University necessary for the years ahead”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020039658 (print) | LCCN 2020039659 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793638267 (Cloth: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781793638281 (Paperback: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781793638274 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Critical pedagogy. | Ricœur, Paul. | Education, Higher—Philosophy. | Just University. Classification: LCC LC196 .P376 2020 (print) | LCC LC196 (ebook) | DDC 378.001—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039658 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039659 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Dedications Jeff dedicates this volume to David Jasper, who has shown a generation of scholars that texts are always open and endlessly deep to those who seek. Daniel dedicates this volume Dave Wittenberg, whose approach to pedagogy showed me the kind of teacher I would want to become.

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

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Preface: Dreaming of the Just University in an Age of Crisis Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss

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Introduction: Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of a Just University Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss

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PART 1: THE JUST UNIVERSITY AS INSTRUCTIONAL SPACE 13 1 The Agon of the Summoned Self in Ricoeur’s Late Philosophy of Religion Mark I. Wallace

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2 Reading Ricoeur Together: Interpretive Work and Surplus Meaning in a Just Pedagogy Charles A. Gillespie

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3 Practical Formation: Teaching Critical Thinking via Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Model Laura Schmidt Roberts

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4 Ricoeur and Transferable Skills Glenn Whitehouse 5 Fallible Pedagogy: How to Balance Liberation and Evaluation with Compassion Daniel Boscaljon

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Contents

6 Oneself as Another and The Argonauts: An Attempt at Interpretive Justice Richard A. Rosengarten

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7 Embodied Pedagogy: Reflections on Becoming Oneself Verna Marina Ehret

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PART 2: THE JUST UNIVERSITY AS A SOCIAL SPACE

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8 The Literary Self: Nostalgia, Kenosis, and Interpretation toward a Renewed Vision and Possibility for the Liberal Arts Jeffrey F. Keuss

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9 Teaching and Learning in Just Institutions: A Ricoeurean Institutional Ethic of Higher Education Michael Le Chevallier

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10 Should Religion-Affiliated Institutions Be Accredited? Ricoeur and the Problem of Religious Inclusivity Nathan Eric Dickman

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11 Interpreting with and for Others: Institutional Research as Hermeneutical Reasoning Kenneth A. Reynhout

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12 Memory, History, and the Forgotten: Ricoeur and Access To Higher Education Vero Rose Smith

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13 Doing Time and Narrative: Teaching in (and out of) Prisons with Paul Ricoeur Howard Pickett

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14 Wounded Memory and a Pedagogy of Hope: Engaging Ricoeur within the Context of Conflicting Pasts Robert Vosloo

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Index 319 Contributors 329

List of Figures and Tables

FIGURES Figure 11.1 Order of operations in Terenzini, “Nature.” Figure 11.2 Order of operations in Ricoeur, various. Figure 11.3 Order of operations: Ricoeur, various, and Terenzini, “Nature,” harmonized by the author.

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TABLES Table 11.1 Institutional Research as Organizational Intelligence. Table 11.2 Institutional Research as Hermeneutical Reasoning.

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Preface: Dreaming of the Just University in an Age of Crisis Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss

This particular book project was born from a conversation between two friends in 2018, in a cozy lobby of a small hotel in Uppsala, Sweden. Uppsala is a fertile context for a project considering questions of justice and higher education. It is located about forty miles north of Stockholm and is notable as having been both central to Sweden’s religious life (starting with the 1164 decision to make this the home of the Archbishop of the Church of Sweden, visible now in the Uppsala Cathedral) and the site of Scandinavia’s oldest university, founded in 1477. Our friendship had started through our share love of literature and theology (we both worked for the journal of that name), an interest in Paul Ricoeur’s thinking, and a passion for unthought possibilities anchored in a commitment to live with integrity. During the chat, Jeff invited Daniel to consider coediting the project that you now are reading. Jeff’s status as a senior scholar—well known and respected in the field—was balanced by Daniel’s experiences as an adjunct in a variety of fields and institutional settings (and passion for editing and coediting collaborative projects). The question of the Just University seemed pressing, even at the time. The price of Higher Education seemed to have an inverse relationship with the quality of content delivered within the classes. The looming specter of a college debt bubble—that would cause an economic collapse at the scale of the housing bubble from earlier—was already on the horizon. Other problems were apparent. The notion of the university as a business, which treated students as customers to whom it catered and emphasized the need for retention, seemed at odds with the pedagogical task of doing justice to the material. Grade inflation was an uneasy way to balance competing perspectives measuring what students could justly claim: one saw paying high tuition rates as cause for better grades, the other saw that students were due a particular grade after just consideration of work they submitted. xi

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Instructors devoted to the liberal arts and helping students gain critical and creative thinking skills confronted the dismaying realization that few places in the world made space for these skills rather than a sense of compliance. The explosion of the internet massively increased access to information, but the “facts” that students found rarely equated to knowledge—and finding wisdom was also rare. The business of the university also seemed to be increasingly unjust in its orientation. The tenure system not only protected the academic freedom of faculty but also exacerbated issues of justice. The publish-or-perish ideal of tenure combined with more researching faculty often resulted in increasingly specialized (and often increasingly irrelevant) articles for an expanding set of publication venues that had become their own business. The swelling ranks of trained academics made it daunting, if not overwhelming, to keep up with current research in even the most narrowly defined field—much less answer other problems, such as how to balance older, traditional scholars (often white men) with new and emerging voices and trends. This, in turn, made it difficult to know what it meant to do justice to one’s topics. The economic crises meant that more faculty remained in their positions, refusing to retire, even if the quality of research and teaching had peaked decades before. Tax cuts meant less support for the project of Higher Education (at one point conceived as a public good), which meant fewer faculty would be appointed to necessary positions. Newly minted PhD’s were faced with dwindling opportunities for jobs, which often led them to taking on multiple adjuncting or short-term lecturing positions for little pay and fewer benefits. Class sizes continued to grow. Community colleges and online programs would not only provide accessible education in terms of cost but also reflect a vast lack of consistency in terms of instructor education or measurable learning. Administrators charged with requiring that their institution remain sustainable were forced to trim majors that were unpopular, no matter how central they had once been to the project of higher education. The rising importance of STEM courses that reflected student future employment hopes meant reconstructing the humanities in terms of functional value, even when the thrust of the humanities reflected a humanistic dedication to keeping humans from becoming pure functionality. The answer to the problems of the Just University required the formation of a just society—one in which wealth was not sequestered into the offshore pockets of a privileged few, but in a world that values the public good as a path for individual fulfillment. Technological tools and the tendency toward creating an accessible education (which advocates of justice support) would inevitably become stymied as these resources came to reflect the values of a world broken by racism and capitalism. Until this just social order arrived,

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the most one could hope for seemed smaller scale commitments: to influence one student life, to write one article, to pay rent next month. The wisdom of Jeff’s question initiated an expansive dialogue that took a lot of unexpected directions. Ricoeur’s ethical imperative, focused on finding a third way that respected all parties, generally led more toward qualified dialectical possibilities than radical statements. And yet in a world dominated by increasingly polarized perspectives, Ricoeur’s carefully cultivated habit of mind and his capacious call for conversation partners (past or present) combined with his commitment to human flourishing to encourage contributors to conceive of a radical Ricoeur. Placing Ricoeur’s wide-ranging interests into contexts that emerged in the fifteen years since his death allowed for a robust set of essays that took Ricoeur into the kinds of lived worlds that he personally, perhaps, never traveled: prisons, poverty, and pedagogy. We had hoped for first drafts to find their way to us by early March 2020. As the first news of COVID started causing colleges and university to close early, leading to the need to re-create classes entirely, the nature of the book began to shift. Continuing to pay faculty and staff, as well as maintain the empty spaces of what were once bustling buildings, exceeded the capacity of increasingly thin budget margins. At present, the ban on international students has shifted some of the economics of student enrollment. As high school graduates—facing the probability of interrupted semesters and a sudden loss of parental income (given skyrocketing levels of unemployment)— consider taking a gap year, many institutions are scrambling to juggle the absolutely unpredictable. Rampant unemployment means that there has never been a better time to invest in higher education—pursuing passions longdeferred—but the stress of living through a global pandemic and the massive economic insecurity makes the thought of studying unmanageable. A month after many schools resumed courses—online—after elongated spring breaks meant that overworked faculty could “transition” courses to Zoom and other online formats, protests against police brutality began to break out. The pandemic, which had already shown the public health costs of America’s institutionalized racism, also provided the opportunity for massive waves of protestors to speak out against police brutality in a series of nonviolent marches. The civil rights movement blazed to life, as questions about justice proliferated—including the need for police, not just the extent to which they could apply force. The NYT bestseller list was suddenly stocked with some of the greatest hits of what had been limited to progressive college classrooms as white citizens suddenly realized that their self-education was long overdue. The combination of these two crises not only delayed the initial plan for the book but also underscored that it was imperative to publish. The uprising sense of revolution grounded on the ethics of black feminism—#BLM—provided a

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space for an academic manifesto. Our essays grappled with the very questions being discussed and circulated—including prisons, identity performance, and the industrial process of education. The economic collapse caused by COVID created new opportunities for the university to move away from the dysfunctional status quo that it had been fighting to preserve and, instead, re-create a model for higher education aligned with contemporary reality. These essays do not provide a set of answers, nor do they suggest a clear and definitive strategy. Instead, they show the importance of thinking carefully, creatively, and critically alongside Ricoeur. They make a case for the humanities as the important missing piece that allowed for our system to persist so unsustainably. They provide ways of thinking of higher education at multiple levels—from syllabus preparation to questions of accreditation that schools face. They question what “classrooms” mean as well as the identities of both students and learners. Each essay, in its way opens up a productive channel for conceiving the university of the future. As an integrative sum, and without cohering into a tidy whole, this collection provides students, teachers, and administrators new ways of thinking about education and Ricoeur. We hope that it will help people at every level of higher education to think differently about how Higher Education can function and flourish in the world that will greet us when schools open. This semester will be the first one that will be relatively assured of not having to switch formats due to COVID. It also will be the first to greet a wave of students who came of age during a time of social distancing, hybrid learning, and racial revolution. There’s never been a better time to think about justice, education, and how we can develop our capacity to flourish. We hope you enjoy. —Jeff and Daniel

Introduction Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of a Just University Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss

The events of 2020—both the pandemic and the protests that followed—have shown the importance of retaining hope as a sign of resiliency in uncertain times. The Black Lives Matter protests, a response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, were clearly anchored in a vision of hope for an America that needed to be healed of its racist past and perpetual hunger for violence. These protests contrast with those that sprang up in late April 2020, signs of the despair endemic to white American culture—especially the demand for the end of shelter-in-place policies and return of a consumerbased economy despite the ongoing suffering and harm to human life caused by this attitude. These widespread visual indexes from early in 2020 show how our best actions involve intimations of an unknowable, uncertain future that enables individual and communal movements that further fragile possibilities. Finding this path of hope requires humility. Ricoeur’s writings often explicitly and always tacitly demonstrate the restless work of questioning that leads to an empowering embrace of our limitations. His invitational and inquiry-based approach to thinking opens a path for the future of education that might seem radical and revolutionary in an academic culture acclimated to economic structures and values. Further, the content of his thought provides a foundation necessary to a system of higher education whose flaws—already apparent throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century—demand a revolutionary reckoning. Deviating from assumptions of superiority or control, Ricoeur’s diverse works allow readers to understand both the awe-inspiring possibilities of the unknowable (beyond mastery) and the extent to which living thoughtfully allows us more influence in our lives than we suspect. This humble approach, with its emphasis on considering interlocutors whose disagreements are 1

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understood with continuous generosity, provides a performance of living thoughtfully. Whether discussing the phenomenology of experience, the potentiality of language, or the possibility of interacting, Ricoeur’s choice of conversation partners, as well as his conclusions, provide his readers with ways to understand the rich resources offered by Western philosophical and Christian religious texts from a variety of insightful perspectives. Ricoeur’s readers find themselves equipped to understand how to listen to and learn from the voices that are essential for shaping new traditions for a Just University that deviates from what had been accepted as “necessary” in the world before COVID-19. Given his expansive corpus, range of topics, and instructive analysis, it makes sense that Ricoeur gathers brilliant readers. Much has been written about how to use his hermeneutic theory, especially in terms of history, narrative, philosophy, psychology, religion, sociology, and theology. Less has been written about how his writings—in total—provide a basis for evaluating the way that we teach, learn, and contextualize our educational processes. This volume is a first step toward showing both how Ricoeur’s work can be deployed as a lens to diagnose contemporary cultural problems and also as a step toward articulating ways to think through the opportunities presented by the limitations created by our contemporary Higher Educational processes. Like many institutions, the university has evolved in ways that reflect changes in the cultures that contextualize it. These changes have been abundant throughout the different systems of higher education developed, at first independently and then in conversation. The span of educational models and centers is wide, ranging from the Greek Academia to the Hebrew Yeshivot, from Islamic madrassas to cathedral schools, from Sankore to Bologna, from Oxford to Harvard, from von Humboldt’s secularized German model to the internet-based Open University of Catalonia and Jones International University. As different cultural models and institutions began to intersect, and especially as the economics of education have become increasingly prominent, the hope for another paradigmatic shift in what the university might become was already surfacing prior to the aftermath of 2020. The possibility of a Just University remains consistent with the general project of education, which, no matter the cultural climate or conditions, orients around two basic propositions. First, educational projects are anchored in social and communal values and thus engage in questions of justice—how to live well with others in community. Educational projects emerge within a social imaginary governed by laws, languages, and assumptions. This means that educational projects inevitably translate what is past into what is present. Its role is twofold with regard to this heritage. On the one hand, education preserves traditions by passing them on from one generation to the next, with the hope that the justice inscribed within the tradition can continue to inspire

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the future. On the other hand, because each generation receives this information within a new context, every act of transmission becomes transformation. Justice invites the education process to train students with skills that correlate with this work: to understand how transformed content relates to the transmission of tradition, and to discover how to apply this content to contexts that differ from the time of its origin. Eventually, these critical and creative skills expand the potentiality of hope, employed toward an anticipation of futures that surpass past prophets’ predictive powers. Successful innovations and discoveries became part of the tradition that is transmitted into futures, which disappear into pasts. Second, education is tied to hope. This means that educational projects are orienting students from the present toward situations of the not-yet. The nature of an educational project presupposes that the purpose of what happens in the present matters, in part, because it participates in the future—or an understanding of the future. Education would be a hopeless enterprise if the future were absolutely unpredictable, or if we could not anticipate a future in which the preliminary skills that were acquired would not prove to be valuable. Educational approaches differ given conflicting hopes—one approach demands the perpetuation of the status quo (whether or not it is just) by emphasizing obedience to universal norms. This approach to teaching is governed by the kinds of hope governed more by a conservative grasping after the past than an open desire for an undetermined tomorrow. Over the past decades, the scope of the university’s appreciation of the future has shifted. The initial appreciation of hope’s relation to vastness of the unknown that could be explored beyond tradition turned to framing hope as a modality of control capable of guaranteeing certain future results. We see the Just University as investing in an alternative approach, which sees the hope of education as intertwined with an experience of liberation—the notion that understanding and then embodying the truth exchanges ignorance for a more appropriate way of living that leads to a better life in an uncontrollable future. It senses that the true heart of education involves traditional content as well as creative and critical thinking skills, and these skills—understood as practical—involve the hope of allowing future generations the gift of a better life than what appears in the present. Without a sense of the potential that the future could be otherwise (and better!) than the present, it would be folly to devote even minimal resources to education. Education systems that embrace their potential for freedom rather than conformity adhere to the premise that the future is malleable—that humans can be surprised. They sense how the present remains pregnant with unlived potentialities that the questions asked within a class can unlock. The quest for knowledge is an embrace of the unknown that anticipates arriving at a question worthy of a life pursuit. This approach discards the illusion of mastery

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for the prospect of humility, fueled by the courage to innovate traditions in society with an expansive generosity. It is an education that invites criticism rather than asserting it. It emphasizes enriched lives rather than riches and livelihoods. It teaches discernment as a practical skill cultivated through the hermeneutic task of identifying identity and difference as a way to question the larger systems that increasingly anchor the existence of higher education itself. The Just University, therefore, is a project at a hinge point of our understanding of both Higher Education and the kind of future it designs for its students. It resists the educational systems common from 1990 to 2019 that often instructed students to embrace and validate the status quo as a way to perpetuate (and gain the approval and resources of) the dominant systems of power. It advocates for using critical and creative thinking skills toward imagining a just future informed by freedom for all persons rather than bending them to justifying a social order based on exclusion. It resists conservative values of efficiency and the systems of measurement developed from an economic environment in which students pay more to learn less. Despite its promises to more knowledge, greater access to information has led to less wisdom. More than ever, education teaches students how to integrate into an unjust world instead of granting tools toward creating a better future. Although it sounds new, especially given the rise of awareness about the problems of racism, classism, and misogyny that culminated through Trump’s assumption of the American presidency, the hope of a Just University is not new. Maxine Greene’s criticism of educational systems and her recommendations toward justice, articulated in the masterful Dialectics of Freedom (1988), have gone unchecked: Whether the students are rich or poor, privileged or deprived, the orientation has been to accommodation, to fitting into existing social and economic structures, to what is given, to what is inescapably there. . . . Little, if anything, is done to render problematic a reality that includes homelessness, hunger, pollution, crime, censorship. . . . Little is done to counter media manipulation of the young into credulous and ardent consumers—of sensation, violence, criminality, things. They are instructed daily, and with few exceptions, that human worth depends on the possession of commodities, community status, a flippant way of talking, good looks. What they are made to believe to be the “news” is half entertainment, half pretenses at being “windows on the world.” They witness political realities played out in semi-theatrical or cinematic terms.1

The children of those educated in 1988, when she was writing, have recreated this world and the advent of the internet has fueled, rather than diminished, the growth of this mindset. Overwhelmed by anxiety and stress, facing more

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demands and fewer opportunities, students have fewer resources with which to dream a better future. This book articulates how Ricoeur’s writings provide resources with which those in Higher Education can respond to the problem. Greene outlines how freedom occurs once one can sense that a situation is a problem, can name the obstacle to freedom inherent within that problem, and can work with a community to create change toward a future whose difference to our contemporary situation is unimaginable. Ricoeur’s work—especially as deployed by the essays collected in this volume, becomes an effective resource in rekindling a sense of how to educate differently toward, beyond observable outcomes, an unknowable and unpredictable tomorrow. 1. PURSUING THE JUST UNIVERSITY This volume is both a meditative space and an activist roadmap. Our desire in this volume is to invoke the possibility of a Just University in the work of transmitting Ricoeur’s content as a form of practical transformation into a different context. Here you will find scholars who represent the manifold disciplines of the modern teaching and research university brought together through the work of Paul Ricoeur. This Just University occupies a position similar to the space of Utopia as Ricoeur described it in some of his later essays on ideology—it provides a necessary space from which the status quo can be reflected upon and critiqued. By conceiving of the possibility of the Just University, the essays summon thoughts of alternative visions for education beyond the model that we have inherited and—in different ways—have invested in maintaining. Additionally, the essays gathered here provide readers with practical roadmaps, concrete suggestions for how to move past a space of critique toward a lived engagement with current university systems. The conceptual space of the Just University views the role of the liberal arts in general, and the humanities in particular, as insisting on the necessity of the moral imagination. It does this by introducing key texts, theories of mind, philosophical postulates, and globally diverse voices that disrupt and transcend the limits of I-Thou dialogue. The Just University is summoned by the call of the third person who has yet to join the collegium. This invitation reorients the community of students, faculty, and staff who attend to the call for justice, seeing and hearing what society neglects and obscures. Gaining an attentive moral imagination is a transformative event: it shifts the locus of ethical creation from the immediate social context to the demands for justice found outside in the world of the other. In short, this is education qua education. What is forged is a call to moral depth and agency—an awareness of common citizenship shared by myself and the unknown other.

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The Just University embodies qualities of justice that specifically pertain to the goods of institutions. These goods are related to, but distinct from, those that emerge from individual relationships. This can be seen in Ricoeur’s adaptation of the I-Thou formula, which nimbly sidesteps and complicates the nepotistic tendencies of dialogic communication as posited by Gadamer and others. In this way, Ricoeur offers a vision for our work in the academy as a workshop of humanism. Through attending to the implicit demands of the third person placed upon the self, Ricoeur erects an ethical system that calls us to deep and abiding friendships that both protect and release us into relationships of trust that are at once safe yet permeable. Though the “I-Thou” formula is still present in Ricoeur, its use is restricted to the description of the interlocution between friends (the first and second persons). Friendship in dialogic communication is an important aspect of human existence, but Ricoeur rightly addresses friendships’ limitations where ethics and justice are concerned. As Ricoeur writes in The Just as “the ‘other’ for friendship is the ‘you’; the ‘other’ for justice is ‘anyone,’ as indicated by the Latin adage suum cuique triuere (to each his own).”2 If we are to create and execute an ethics which transcend the immediate social situation, then the cry of the transcending other needs to be appropriated and integrated into the self. Our capacity to adopt the needs of the other within our ethical systems establishes personhood and identity: “The capacity of a human agent to designate himself as the author of his acts has considerable significance for the subsequent assignment of rights and duties.”3 The Just University, centered on the social space for the Other, provides the foundation from which we can correct democracy’s errors as pointed out by #metoo, #BLM, #flintwatercrisis and #standingrock. In this, Ricoeur reminds us that belonging to a just institution requires that we become truly human with one another. On this basis, we then use our agency to become authors of selfhood with rights and duties that are afforded by this designation. The premise of the Just University begins with this assertion: the work and purpose of the institution is found in people who author their own agency, conversationally tied to their friendships with other authors and creators of meaning in a spirit of humility and justice. As co-creators within a just university, our ability to produce and construct moral statements establishes us as moral agents, and also as morally culpable individuals. In this, we can underscore that to be friends in the just university is also to be moral for the other. Therefore, the third person, the unknown other, the aporia outside of the university, becomes the principal figure around which my own ethical world revolves, toppling my role as moral center. This has profound implications for how to create the Just University in this world. Rather than seeing itself as the center, the Just University is a gathered space of like-hearted persons facing outward to the cultures and cares of the as yet unknown, keeping open

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hearts and minds, seeking to humbly engage and embrace that which seeks to join. To assert that the unknown other can have impact upon my own inner life (which effectively refigures my notion of moral agency) without ever establishing a connection between myself and the embodied others I avoid and exclude, seems highly untenable. Here Ricoeur reminds us that the ontological gulf between she and me is bridged through the exercise of imagination. The role of the Just University, as we imagine it, becomes one that equips students with this ethical vision, consistent with educational priorities that liberate students to face a world that might become. This means taking responsibility to safeguard a space in which the other is invited to imagine community different than what has come before. The combination of self and social awareness, developed through the instructive and imaginative texts Ricoeur left for us, empowers students to confidently remain open to a free exchange of ideas. This conversation, held on antiracist, anti-misogynist, and anti-imperialist terms, will liberate participants and expand the vision for the potential meaning of community beyond anything the world has known. 2. THE NEED FOR JUSTICE IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY Every generation asks what will be sustained, and what sustains it, amidst the terrors found within its age. Outside of government and faith communities, few institutions have documented, memorialized, and created space for all the hopes and despair of human flourishing quite like the modern university. In the past few centuries, the university has made a home for ideals, but also has given disappointment a seat in the lecture hall. The unbridled barbarity and passionate justice-seeking prominent in the twentieth century, filled with multiple modes of terror coupled with the prophetic rise of marginalized voices, offered necessary correctives to the monolinguism of the West. This unmasked the illusions of the nineteenth-century university in many ways— illusions embedded in the set and fixed literary canon that cradled the myth of an infinitely perfectible society. These changes led to the fracturing of a robust notion of culture sufficient to meet the demands of the new century. Following the “season in hell” of twentieth-century warfare, the ravages of colonialism, sanctioned state torture, and the corporate greed-based economics of capitalism, the illusion of the ethno and political centrality of the West as an essential part of what it means to be a society has been undermined. The connections between high cultural achievements in the West and the violence of colonialism have been made clear. The axiom of historical progress is likewise destroyed by the coexistence of terror and culture in advanced

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Western societies. It is difficult to believe in the teleological vision of history anymore. This leads to the loss of “forward dreaming” for many in the West: it is increasingly difficult for many to imagine a clear path to the future. Other social transformations accompany this change: social stratifications separate rural from urban life and disconnect higher education from humane social conduct. The ideal of Bildung once put forward by Goethe, whereby the collective disciplines of the human condition—those of the arts and sciences alongside those of the apprenticeship and professional training—has seemingly vanished with the Enlightenment image of the university. To be blunt: the twenty-first-century university is a highly conflicted place. University administrators increasingly base educational decisions on economic justifications. The telos of education is simply classed as participation in the economy. Today, the central sphere of professional intellectual work clearly belongs to the sciences and technology, which drive the engine of the economy. Corporations sponsor growing quantities of scientific/technological research; professors are paid in stock options by the companies that fund their work. The leisure of disinterested inquiry has given way to a war of all against all for scarce resources. In this war, the role of the arts and sciences as a formational part of education suffers daily defeats against the profit-driven technological complex that is today’s marketplace. The fate of academia, previously governed by globalization combined with capitalist competition, has awakened with new life. The university’s economic emphasis has encouraged an overtly Epicurean approach that attempts to offer everything and ultimately nothing. In this deeply secularized vision, the university curriculum either treats culture merely as an oppressive force or trivializes culture by reducing it to costume and cuisine. Schools sell students on climbing walls, soft serve ice cream, and fairy lights strung across dorm room ceilings shot with filters and sold as ski lodges. Given grade inflation, the university serves as the site of a prolonged adolescence rather than space for wonder or wisdom. While many universities seemingly self-destruct as a medium of genuine culture formation under these conditions, hope persists. We embody hope as we pursue justice. This volume builds on Ricoeur to supply a vision and pathway toward a model of dynamic higher education, providing resources for scholars who wish to act with depth and passion toward the forging of a place that is just and truth-seeking. In a time where much of cultural formation seems to take place outside the fixed traditional university—through what Arjun Appadurai calls the Global Cultural Economy4—we need to be listening to these voices and respond, not merely react, from a reflective repose that holds firm to our mission. The Just University is not a training ground for marketable employees who will become dutiful consumers; instead, it empowers scholar-activists, attuned to the call of the Other, who are both

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grounded in the formative insights of the arts and sciences and also grafted to the tools needed to transform the world. 3. RICOEUR AND THE INVITATION TO THE JUST UNIVERSITY The world looks different than it did when Ricoeur died, fifteen years ago. It looks different as we write than it did six months ago. Voices that demand justice for the marginalized facing food and shelter insecurities in the present are met with the angry voices of the privileged who feel insecure about their viability in the future. Reasons for both hope and despair continue to flourish—courageous actions are answered with the use of systemic coercion or other forms of violence that allow corrupted forms of tradition to perpetuate themselves. The space of the university has changed to reflect digital mediations that have left us both more interconnected and more isolated. In his analysis of ideology and utopia, Ricoeur describes the complex relationships institutions have relative to the communities that they both anchor and guide. In preserving their communities, which evolve and change in response to the general culture, institutions are summoned to balance tradition (the ground from the past) with innovation (anticipating the future). Too much innovation will make an institution and its community too different, whereas adhering to a conservative impulse threatens the institution’s continuing relevance. In our current society, academic, political, and religious institutions have long been dominant forces that have maintained a sense of cohesion as societies have continued to expand and evolve. Within these institutions, individuals have advocated for various kinds of balance. Among these three institutions, academia possesses a unique vantage point: part of its tradition involves offering a space of critical reflection on institutions and communities. Although even these institutions have become increasingly conservative, especially as they’re often beholden to either political (economic) or religious institutional gatekeepers, individuals within academia tend to favor more progressive and innovative forms of thinking. Perhaps because education remains focused on the virtue of hope relative to future generations (rather than being fixed on the “now” of politics or the afterlife that often orients religious communities), it remains an institution where conversations about justice are valued. Thus, while the essays gathered in this volume follow Ricoeur in speaking about justice by reflecting on justice as understood by religion and politics, the intended audience is educators—largely represented by academia. The

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collection is divided into two parts, which balance the obligations of the Just University to its two primary communities: students and society. Part 1 “The Just University as Instructional Space,” provides tools that guide instructors in academia toward embodying the ideals of the Just University in terms of its function: providing education to students. Mark Wallace, in chapter 1, examines the role of conscience in Ricoeur’s later thought, and asks whether this capacity of mediatorial judgment, in the end, can adequately account for the tragic contestations between one’s sense of the good and the larger society’s that now beset institutional life—including the life of the modern corporate university. In chapter 2, Charles Gillespie looks at Just Pedagogy in terms of the creation of a syllabus that foregrounds the work of discourse and interpretation within the classroom as a community. Chapter 3 features Laura Schmidt Roberts, who offers an in-depth discussion of how critical thinking skills are developed through Ricoeur’s hermeneutic arc, looking especially at the stage of “appropriation” as it applies to her Biblical Studies courses. Glenn Whitehouse’s discussion in chapter 4 uses Ricoeur’s arguments concerning the practical role of explanation in hermeneutics to argue for how liberal arts programs justly advocate “transferable skills” such as critical thinking as well as the content of courses. Daniel Boscaljon, in chapter 5, examines just practice in terms of testing and evaluation relative to Ricoeur’s emphasis on fallibility and the notion of a pedagogy devoted to transformation. This is followed by Richard Rosengarten’s exploration of how Ricoeur’s discussion of the otherness of the self meshes with Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts to help students understand different approaches to conceiving of identity formation in chapter 6. This part concludes with chapter 7, where Verna Ehret looks at the transformative potentiality of teaching as a just practice. Part 2 “The Just University as a Social Space,” shifts to examining the role that academia as an institution plays within society as a whole, questioning how it can serve to promote justice in communities beyond traditional college classrooms. In chapter 8, Jeff Keuss looks to how hermeneutics and kenosis help renew and reignite the mission of the liberal arts through reforging individual self-understanding that takes into account nostalgia, kenosis, and interpretation as educational resources for deep meaning-making. Michael Le Chevallier provides a sense of how Ricoeur’s work repositions the roles of institutional awareness and understanding in chapter 9, focusing particularly on California’s university system. Eric Dickman explores the question of institutional accreditation in chapter 10, exploring the question of justice as it relates to institutions that prioritize religious roots. Chapter 11 features Ken Reynhout’s discussion how Ricoeur’s hermeneutic understanding can serve as a conceptual basis that underpins direction for Institutional Research. Vero Rose Smith, in chapter 12, examines how the Just University can serve the needs of the broader public, looking at the importance of public art for students

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beyond the classroom. Howard Pickett also looks at nontraditional classroom spaces in chapter 13 as he addresses the importance of looking at educating the “inside” populations who are enmeshed in the penal industry. Finally, in chapter 14, Robert Vosloo looks at the importance of a pedagogy of hope for healing widespread social trauma, combining Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of reception with African educational pioneer Russel Botman’s “pedagogy of hope.” “Between Fear and Hope” is the title of Boaventura de Sousa’s conclusion to his 2018 work The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. In it, de Sousa begins by citing Spinoza, who claims that fear and hope are the two basic emotions that govern human reactions to uncertainty in the world, but that these options and opportunities are not equally dispersed. He makes his argument for the epistemologies of the South by showing the failure of the world built on “modern science” and the myth “that all social problems and political problems will have technical solutions.”5 He advises, anticipating the sea changes introduced in 2020, that an epistemological and political intervention may be required. Our hope, as the editors of this collection, is that those who are inspired by the vision of the Just University can see how Ricoeur’s vision for thinking uncertainly and in community with others might provide a framework from which new voices and epistemologies can be welcomed and integrated. de Sousa predicts that “polycentric ways and sites of unlearning and learning,” which seem important to a vision of the Just University, will require profound self-reflexivity. He recommends that the global North, with its history of capitalism, colonialism, and embrace of patriarchy, “must be focused on the idea and value of diversity, the recognition of different ways of knowing and being” and that the global South use self-reflexivity to focus on “how to represent the world as one’s own and how to transform it according to one’s own priorities after so much expropriation and violence.”6 The hermeneutical, philosophical, and political resources Ricoeur developed in his lifetime are useful for undertaking this task, which is an essential part of moving toward the Just University. Ricoeur is justly known for his having cultivated an expansive set of conversation partners throughout his career, thinkers whom he used to help sharpen his thinking and expand his sense of what was possible and desirable in the world. The essays collected here indicate paths toward doing so within the boundaries of the Just University as an institution and as a set of human relationships. We hope that you will join us in helping to transform the university, and then the world, into a place where all can explore the world with freedom and curiosity. NOTES 1. Maxine Greene, Dialectics of Freedom (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1988), 12.

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2. Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xiii, emphasis original. 3. Ricoeur, The Just, 3. 4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 5. Boaventura de Sousa, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 295. 6. de Sousa, End of the Cognitive Empire, 296.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Greene, Maxine. Dialectics of Freedom. New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1988. Ricoeur, Paul. The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. de Sousa, Boaventura. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Part 1

THE JUST UNIVERSITY AS INSTRUCTIONAL SPACE

Chapter 1

The Agon of the Summoned Self in Ricoeur’s Late Philosophy of Religion Mark I. Wallace

A distinguishing feature of Ricoeur’s later moral and religious thought is his analysis of the role of conscience (conscience) in preserving the parity between excess and reciprocity in relations with self and others. By thinking alongside figures such as Anselm, Kant, and Lévinas, Ricoeur posits the inner voice to negotiate the contradiction between the pure ideal of extravagant, unilateral love and the exchange economies of justice that circulate within everyday existence. Ricoeur’s conciliatory philosophy urges his readers to subsist in and through this existential ambiguity—to oscillate ceaselessly between the poles of otherness and selfhood, grace and law, love and justice, forgiveness and debt, and extravagance and circularity. And in order to prevent these poles from hardening into opposition, he proposes prudential wisdom, an extension of Aristotelian phronesis, as a heuristic for easing the aporia between self and other. In this essay, I first take up Ricoeur’s intersectional self-understanding as a philosopher and biblical exegete in order to make sense of his call for a productive impasse between other-directed ethics and self-attestation. I examine this call against the backdrop of his indebtedness to and difference from Lévinas. I then consider the relevance of Ricoeur’s summons to live into the excess/reciprocity paradox in relation to Bonhoeffer’s fateful decision to join the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler in 1943, and my own embrace of civil disobedience through the fossil fuels divestment movement at my home university, Swarthmore College. Gesturing to Bonhoeffer’s evolution from pacifism to tyrannicide in the World War II, and the relevance of direct action to blunt climate disaster today, I conclude with an immanent critique of Ricoeur’s notion of conscience. Ricoeur offers phronetic wisdom as a middle term for mitigating the tension between inner certainty and communal truth. I question, however, 15

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whether the work of phronesis can bear the weight of the irredeemable conflicts that scar the subject’s agon over how to comport oneself in the light of wider social norms that contradict one’s ownmost convictions. Ricoeur offers the discipline of wisdom-in-judgment to moderate, if not resolve altogether, the antinomy between the self’s interior certainties and the broader society’s commonplace values. But my point will be that the exercise of mediatorial judgment, in the end, cannot account for the tragic contestations between one’s sense of the good and the larger society’s that now beset institutional life—including the life of the modern corporate university. 1. THE WAGER OF FAITH To begin, let me make some preliminary comments about Ricoeur’s identity as a philosopher who uses the biblical texts to provide imaginary variations on the theme of the good life. (These comments will frame how I understand the pursuit of the Just University, a point I will take up at the end of my essay.) As a philosopher, Ricoeur is a hermeneutical phenomenologist, to use Don Ihde’s felicitous description of Ricoeur;1 and as a biblical exegete, he is an interpreter of the meaning of the Word within the words of the scriptural intertexts. Hermeneutical philosophy and biblical interpretation—these two tasks constitute the distinctive, but always related, fulcrums on which Ricoeur’s thought turns. This blend of philosophical insight and biblical exegesis, two common ways people derive a sense of authoritative knowledge, is often treated as the work of theology. But is Ricoeur a theologian? Ricoeur was my teacher at the University of Chicago in the 1980s, and I recall at that time a conversation with him about why he resisted the label “theologian” as part of his identity. Born in 1913, he was orphaned at a young age and raised by his Huguenot Protestant paternal grandparents and an aunt. While religious, he told me that if he or others were to characterize his work as theological, it would conjure in French intellectual circles the negative stereotype that his writing was predetermined by a secret religious agenda at odds with reason and argument. Ricoeur said that he prefers to be understood not as a theologian but as a philosopher who engages in biblical interpretation. I took this to mean that as a philosopher and interpreter of the Bible, Ricoeur’s concern is to avoid the labels of theologian, philosophical theologian, or Christian philosopher in order to ward off the charges that, as a philosopher, he engages in cryptotheology to promote his philosophical aims. On the one hand, Ricoeur is not a philosophical theologian, if by that phrase one means a religious thinker who grounds reflections on God and the self on a particular philosophical foundation. On the other, he is not a

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Christian philosopher, if by that phrase one means a philosopher who utilizes philosophical discourse to prove the truth of Christian faith claims in opposition to other rival claims. “I am not a Christian philosopher, as rumor would have it, in a deliberately pejorative, even discriminatory sense. I am, on one side, a philosopher, nothing more. . . . And, on the other, a Christian who expresses himself philosophically.”2 As a Christian who writes philosophy, Ricoeur posits faith as an existential gamble—a risk that can never be established as apodictically certain based on the false security of a philosophical substructure.3 “Christian life is a wager and a destiny, and those who take it up are not led by their confession either to assume a defensive position or to presume a superiority in relation to every other form of life, because we lack criteria of comparison capable of dividing among rival claims.”4 As a wager, faith eschews any triumphalism that would enlist a particular philosophical system to justify one set of life choices as inherently superior to another set of choices. The only verification of the truth of such choices is found, over the course of one’s existence, in the rich quality of a life well lived that is the product of one’s faith commitments. No heteronomous thought system external to these commitments can adjudicate which, if any, alternative forms of life are superior to another. In this respect, Ricoeur might be best described as an neo-Anselmian philosopher. Anselm, the philosopher monk and bishop of the eleventh century, is well-known for his “faith seeking understanding” approach to religiously inflected intellectual life: to press philosophy into the service of rendering biblical faith publicly credible.5 Biblical faith, while neither the queen of philosophy nor its handmaiden, is arguably for Ricoeur one of the generative impulses—but never the determining ground—for his whole philosophical enterprise. On this reading, religion provides the rich matrix of images, stories, and language that motivates and informs Ricoeur’s religiously autonomous and methodologically agnostic philosophy of the moral life.6 Consider Ricoeur’s disagreement with Kant on this issue. Unlike Kant who moves from a supposed presuppositionless critical philosophy to a regional application of the critical philosophy to religious questions, Ricoeur begins his various projects in the fullness of his beliefs, and then strives critically to understand better the implications of such beliefs through the discipline of philosophical inquiry. Instead of following Kant’s question in the first Critique, namely—how can knowledge be denied in order to make room for faith?7—Ricoeur asks, in the fullness of faith, how can critical inquiry explicate the meaning of the epistemic presumptions and lived concerns generated by faith? Or, as Ricoeur puts it in an earlier context, how can philosophy be pressed into the service of saturating faith with intelligibility?8 In the Introduction to Oneself as Another, Ricoeur states that his abiding interests in various philosophical problems—including the overall problem of the

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self—is motivated by the “convictions that bind me to biblical faith.”9 Here Ricoeur makes clear his rejection of the quixotic illusion of philosophy—to begin thought without presuppositions—by fully owning his positioned belonging to the rich heritage of biblical language and imagery as one of the principal wellsprings of his philosophical itinerary. A year before his passing in 2005 in his posthumous Living Up to Death, Ricoeur writes of himself as a “Christian: someone who professes a primordial adhesion to the life, the words, the death of Jesus.”10 Ricoeur’s “primordial adhesion” to the Jesus tradition is the animating life-world, but not the intellectual basis, of his autonomous philosophical inquiry into the nature of selfhood and otherness. 2. RICOEUR AND LÉVINAS ON THE QUESTION OF SELFHOOD In this section, I will take up Ricoeur’s dialogue with Lévinas concerning self and other first by way of analyzing a central problematic in Ricoeur’s moral philosophy: the question of the “broken cogito” and the role of conscience in mediating the fundamental discontinuity of the self with itself. For Ricoeur, the self is permanently “other” to itself because, contrary to Descartes, the self is not a fixed subject, in full possession of itself, that perdures over time. Through an analysis of the phenomenon of passivity or alterity within selfhood,11 my self, according to Ricoeur, cobbles together its identity by experiencing the “otherness” of my own body, the dissymmetry between myself and the other person in front of me, and, finally, and most importantly for my analysis, the originary phenomenon of being “called” by the voice of conscience—a voice both proximate and exterior to me—that summons me to my obligations and responsibilities. By conscience, Ricoeur writes that it is the voice . . . addressed to me from the depths of myself . . . . the forum of the colloquy of the self with itself. . . . We need, I think, to preserve within the metaphor of the voice the idea of a unique passivity, both internal and superior to me. . . . In this sense, conscience is nothing other than the attestation by which a self affects itself. . . . The point is that human being has no mastery over the inner, intimate certitude of existing as a self; this is something that comes to us, that comes upon us, like a gift, a grace, that is not at our disposal. This nonmastery of a voice that is more heard than spoken leaves intact the question of its origin. . . . The strangeness of the voice [of conscience] is no less than that of the flesh or that of other human.12

In the depths of one’s interiority, the subject is enjoined to live well with oneself and for others. The colloquy of the self with itself—the phenomenon

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of being enjoined—occurs in the place where the self appropriates for itself the demand of the other upon it. Conscience, then, is the inner forum for the summoning of the self to its ownmost obligations. As I noted above, while Ricoeur scrupulously avoids grounding the disciplines of religious thought and philosophy upon one another, he does not object to borrowing concepts from one domain in order to illuminate problems within the discourse of the other field of inquiry. The upshot of this careful give-and-take interchange is Ricoeur’s recognition of certain deep affinities that exist between key terms that intersect the two disciplines. His analysis of the phenomenon of conscience is emblematic of this homologous approach to understanding the human condition. In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur is self-consciously agnostic about the origins of conscience, the experience of being enjoined by the other: “Perhaps the philosopher as philosopher has to admit that one does not know and cannot say whether . . . the source of the injunction, is another person . . . or my ancestors . . . or god—living God, absent God—or an empty place. With this aporia . . . philosophical discourse comes to an end.”13 But in one of the two theological papers that Ricoeur excised from the original set of Gifford Lectures that constitute Oneself as Another, Ricoeur does identify the origins of conscience in the voice of God—a voice that enjoins the hearer to care for oneself and attend to the needs of others. In his omitted lecture on the summoned self, Ricoeur identifies conscience as the inner chamber where the divine mandate is heard and understood. In the interior voice of obligation, each person is called by God to exercise responsibility for oneself and the other. Indeed, conscience is now valorized as the inalienable contact point between the Word of God and human beings; it is the innermost forum where divine forgiveness, care for oneself, and solicitude for others intersect. “Conscience is thus the anthropological presupposition without which ‘justification by faith’ would remain an event marked by radical extrinsicness. In this sense, conscience becomes the organ of the reception of the Kerygma, in a perspective that remains profoundly Pauline.”14 Without conscience, the divine voice that summons the self to its responsibilities falls on deaf ears. Ricoeur’s analysis of conscience reflects the life-long impact of Lévinas on his thought, both religious and philosophical. As does Lévinas, Ricoeur, in his theological writings on conscience argues that the biblical scriptures consistently press onto the reader the obligation to appropriate God’s demand—a demand definitively represented by the biblical prophets—to take responsibility for the welfare of the other. Along with Lévinas, Ricoeur maintains that the ideal of the morally commissioned self is central to the biblical texts. In particular, the establishment of the prophetic I, through heeding the call of obligation for the other, is an underlying theme throughout these texts. In

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exegeting the Abrahamic/Mosaic response “here I am,” Ricoeur writes, “I see, for my part, in this figure of a ‘summoned subject’ a paradigm that the Christian community, following the Jewish community, could make use of to interpret itself.”15 Ricoeur’s position regarding the prophetic subject is analogous to Lévinas’s, who writes that “the religious discourse that precedes all religious discourse is not dialogue. It is the ‘here I am’ said to a neighbor to whom I am given over, by which I announce peace, that is, my responsibility for the other.”16 In spite of this agreement, an important point of contention separates Ricoeur and Lévinas in reference to the questions of conscience and the summoned self, namely, whether the self is constituted solely by its obedience to the cry of the other for justice, or whether the move to selfhood and the capacity to respond to the entreaty of the other are coorginary? In other words, is the self a product of the other’s summoning it to its responsibilities, or is it not the case that the presence of the self itself, in the depths of its own conscience, is the necessary condition for hearing and responding to the other’s attempt to awaken it to its responsibilities? For Lévinas, I become a subject through radical self-divestment, by becoming hostage to the other. “The more I return to myself, the more I divest myself . . . I am ‘in myself’ through the others.”17 I have no self—I am not an “I”—without the other awakening me to my responsibility for the welfare of the other: “The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone. . . . I exist through the other and for the other.”18 Ricoeur contends, however, that Lévinas’s idea of the passive self, singularly formed in response to unfulfillable obligation, undermines the dialectic between self and other, realized through the agency of one’s conscience, essential to moral action. Conscience, as we have seen, is the site of intersection between selfhood and otherness, the place where my ethical ownness “within” and the commanding voice of the other “without” indwell one another, according to Ricoeur.19 Only a self—as the subject and object, in its conscience, of its own internal dialogue—can have an other-than-self rouse it to its responsibility. Only a self—insofar as it esteems itself as a self capable of reason, agency, and good will—can exercise solicitude for others. Ricoeur argues that self-identity is not merely a result of one's response to the call of the other; it is also what must be presupposed for the call to be heard and understood in the first place. Pace Lévinas, Ricoeur asks, “would the self be a result [of its assignment to take responsibility for the other] if it were not first a presupposition, that is, potentially capable of hearing this assignment? . . . Is it forbidden to a reader, who is a friend of . . . Lévinas, to puzzle over a philosophy where the attestation of the self and the glory of the absolute [or, the care of the other] would be co-originary?”20 Selfattestation—the capacity for self-esteem—has its origin in my self-reflexive

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openness to being enjoined to give myself to meet the other’s needs even as my hearing and understanding the voice of the other has its origin in my regard for myself as a moral subject. Ricoeur stubbornly insists on preserving self-love and other-regard in a correlative tension that he argues is snapped by Lévinas’s one-sided emphasis on self-emptying obedience in the face of the summons of the other.21 Ricoeur’s fundamental anthropology resists, then, the poles of ethical solipsism whereby the other’s plea is ignored but also extreme passivity in which the other’s primacy is absolute. My point is that self-avowal and responsibility for others mutually coarise within one’s conscience—the heartfelt inner forum wherein the subject becomes a self in ready openness to the claims of the other on itself. 3. PHRONESIS AS MEANS BY WHICH CONVICTION AND CONSENSUS IS MEDIATED In this essay, I have sought to show how Ricoeur—in faithfulness and in contrast to Lévinas—persuasively deploys a notion of conscience as a power of inward deliberation that mediates self-esteem and solicitude for the other. In this respect, Ricoeur’s discussion of conscience has a distinctly Aristotelian cast: analogous to Aristotle’s analysis of virtue, Ricoeur understands conscience as the self’s capacity for inward adjudication between extremes.22 Conscience is an exercise in prudential, reflective equilibrium. It is the colloquy of the self with itself where one’s interior capacity for practical wisdom—phronesis—thoughtfully guides action directed to care of self and care of others. In Ricoeur, one’s capacity for phronesis enables the relational subject to equitably discern the right means between extremes—lest these extremes ossify into binary oppositions. Ricoeur’s turn to conscience-driven phronesis reflects the dialogic and mediatory character of his thought. This orientation makes clear why he seeks to preserve the dialectic between reciprocity and excess in his philosophy of religion. In the case of the Bible, understood oppositionally, the gospel command to love the enemy is unilateral, asymmetric, and excessively otherdirected, while the scriptural ideal of justice is rule-governed, bilateral, and thoughtfully self-reflexive. Ricoeur argues against allowing this polarity to harden into an absolute antinomy, and suggests instead the need for an “unstable equilibrium” between the nonutilitarian demand to love at all costs and the practical efficacy of adjudicating competing interests between self and other in societies governed by the rule of law. Ricoeur’s dialectic is an instructive counterweight to other contemporary theorists of responsibility, justice, and gift. In particular, I have shown how Ricoeur criticizes Lévinas’s philosophy of the other as unable to sustain the

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contradictory poles of gratuity and circularity. In religious terms, Ricoeur’s nonoppositional preservation of the biblical ideal of extravagant love, and the equally important scriptural theme of social justice that accounts for the needs of the other and the self in one’s everyday relations, pushes beyond Lévinas’s one-sided call for extravagant hypermorality in the prescriptive and prophetic registries of the biblical witness. Ricoeur’s alternation between excess and exchange is a productive challenge to Lévinas’s consistent valorization of unilateral morality with little if any attention to the needs of the self and the importance of reciprocity in one’s relation with others. Finally, Ricoeur’s recent work is especially pointed in maintaining that the inner colloquy of phronetic conscience must engage a plurality of voices—be it the voice of others or the voice of God or the voice of the nowhere—in order to address the conflicting demands borne by the conscience of the moral subject. Nodding to Greek theater, he writes in the final essay of The Just about the “tragic dimension of action” where “strong evaluations relating to heterogeneous and sometimes competing goods” come into opposition with one another.23 Moral conflict stems from the irreducible diversity of substantial goods. At times, all of these goods cannot be brought together to form a larger synthesis in particular situations of ethical decision-making. The results of such decision-making are often tragic because there is no universal maxim that can adjudicate which goods are to be preserved and which are to be deemphasized or sacrificed altogether. For certain decisions, there is no formal rule—such as Kant’s categorical imperative—that can mediate between contesting notions of the good. Such decisions are tragic because they entail murky mediatorial positions that preserve the lesser of two evils rather than the elevation of a higher good over and against an obvious evil. “Wisdom in judging consists in elaborating fragile compromises where it is a matter less of deciding between good and evil, between black and white, then between gray and gray, or, in the highly tragic case, between bad and worse.”24 When incompatible goods or norms enter into conflict, practical moral wisdom consists of muddy compromises played out in the darker registers of human action. It is at this point in his analysis of tragic decision-making that Ricoeur appeals to group process in moral judgments. Within one’s individual conscience, the antinomies created by weighing different moral options appear to be hopelessly at odds with one other. But now conscience—the inner forum of self speaking to self—has a larger set of conversation-partners to appeal to about the right course of action to pursue. Ricoeur writes, the decision taken at the end of a debate with oneself, at the heart of what we may call our innermost forum, our heart of hearts, will be all the more worthy of being called wise if it issues from a council, on the model of our French

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national consultative council on ethics, or on the model of the small circle bringing together relatives, doctors, psychologists, and religious leaders at the bed of someone who is dying. Wisdom in judging and the pronouncement of wise judgment must always involve more than one person. Then conscience truly merits the name conviction.25

Practical wisdom consists of moving outside of oneself toward a larger body of decision-makers—a relevant governmental body, for example, or the inner circle of one’s immediate family—that can provide a wider reflective context for moral judgment. Indeed, such judgment is not truly moral, Ricoeur avers, unless it “always involves more than one person.”26 No important moral decision should be taken alone—rather, one’s conscience must always seek counsel with a larger sensus communis as a check and balance against one’s own individual discernment about the application of the good (or goods) in particular circumstances. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur avers that the “wider reciprocal exchange [between people] consolidates the feeling of existing along with other humans. . . . This ‘betweenness’ opens the field to dissensus as much as to consensus.”27 Here Ricoeur makes clear that dissent from the wider sensus communis is a possibility, but only insofar as it functions within the shared “betweenness” that binds together human community. Dissensus, then, is an option within the horizon of a circular economy of shared assumptions and values. But individual dissent has its limits. Ricoeur criticizes “the excessive accent placed on the theme of difference in many contemporary theories of the social bond.”28 In this framework, deeply personal dissent fundamentally disproportionate to the regnant norms of the intersubjective whole makes little sense. 4. BONHOEFFER’S REGICIDAL THEOLOGY OF THE SHATTERED SELF As someone who is generally sympathetic to Ricoeur’s fundamental anthropology, here I want to register my unease with Ricoeur’s appeal to socially formed, prudential decision-making as the guarantor of sound moral judgment. As I see it, the problem with Ricoeur’s social theory of conscience is that it appears unable to account for those acts of strong inner conviction that question the received wisdom of the wider circle said to be essential to phronetic reasoning. If practical decisions are not truly wise apart from social mediation, then what role, if any, can an individual’s ownmost moral certainties play in calling them to perform actions that undermine the beliefs and values of their own cultural milieu?

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The problem with Ricoeur’s social model of moral judgment is a certain tone deafness to the importance of irreducible alterity in the formation of sound judgment. If conscience is ultimately subsumable to the larger social group, is there any place for the sometimes unique and distinctively “other” voice of “the good within” to question or even tear apart the fabric of one’s normative social relations and conventions? Ricoeur’s consistent emphasis on the relational intersubjectivity of moral wisdom seems unable to account for the autonomous excesses of the distinctive individual whose ethical praxis appears independent from, and a comprehensive challenge to, their lived surroundings. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and work gives evidence of the irresolvable dilemmas that plague conscience within a wider social setting. It is wellknown that Bonhoeffer’s active resistance to the Nazis—culminating in his participation in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler in 1943—eventually led to his execution in the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945. However, Bonhoeffer’s unfinished book on Ethics, written prior to and during the time he was vigorously working to subvert the Reich government in the early 1940s, paradoxically lifts high the ideal of loyalty to the state. The irony here is that precisely at the time in which Bonhoeffer is beginning to plot to overthrow the rule of the National Socialists in Germany, he is also imploring the readers of his Ethics to remember that the claim of government is from God and binding on conscience; that proper deference to the governing authorities is the proper rule for citizens of the state; that even when the government makes war against the church, the Christian should avoid any “apocalyptic diabolization of government”; and that while concrete acts of disobedience to government are occasionally licit, no regular and systemic disobedience of government is permissible, no matter how anti-democratic and anti-God the ruling powers have become.29 The ironic conflict that punctuates the division between Bonhoeffer’s theological apologetic for government and his treasonable activities to overthrow government elucidates the internal battle of opposing viewpoints within conscience. Bonhoeffer was well aware of this interior contest. He writes that in order to listen to and heed one’s conscience—under the tutelage of the Gospel message—it is sometimes necessary to “bear guilt for the sake of charity.”30 In fidelity to conscience, one may find oneself running the risk of incurring guilt in pursuit of the responsible action in service to God and one’s neighbor. Indeed, at times, one must do the wrong thing in order to do the right thing; one must become a sinner in pursuit of responsible and righteous action; one must shatter commonplace morality, even one’s own sense of the good, in order to pursue a higher good.31 Given his theology of the divine right of government, Bonhoeffer himself—in living out the dictates of his conscience to join the conspiracy to kill Hitler—also, fundamentally, violated

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his conscience by assuming the guilt of murder through disobeying the commandment of the Decalogue, “Thou shalt not kill.” Of course, in earlier drafts of his Ethics, that Bonhoeffer had been a pacifist who wrote that the Christian life consisted of the nonviolent love of one’s enemies only further complicates this hopelessly aporetic division between his erstwhile ethic of compassion and forgiveness and his now-seditious lifedecision to join the conspiracy. As Lori Brandt Hale puts it, by 1942, which marked three years of working as a double agent for the Abwehr and brought to light the third draft of the Ethics, Bonhoeffer no longer understood the call to “love your enemies” as primary. Moreover, he dropped the language of “love your enemy” from his writing almost entirely. He realized that the structure of a responsible Christian life, in which one lives with and for others, includes, necessarily, the readiness to take on guilt. Repentant for the failure on the part of the church to speak out against the systematic annihilation of the Jews, and freed in the forgiveness of Christ to act responsibly on behalf of those who were weak and voiceless and suffering, Bonhoeffer boldly took his place among the conspirators, no matter the cost.32

Using Bonhoeffer, my criticism of Ricoeur here focuses on the relative lack of emphasis in his later work on the unassimable voices—whatever the origin of such voices, whether they come from God, or the self, or from some “other” other—that make claims on the inner authority of conscience over and against the wider society’s received wisdom. My suggestion is that conscience, in many instances, is not a royal road to reflective judgment, a still point in the turning world of moral action, but a contested site of deep and boundless turmoil where the antinomic character of ethical decision-making is most keenly felt. This criticism is not to deny that Ricoeur is acutely aware, in his earlier work, of the tensive disproportionality of the self with itself in its incapacity to mediate the consciousness of freedom and brokenness of unfulfilled desire. But in his later work it remains unclear to me why Ricoeur does not thematize the phenomenon of conscience with the same awareness of the illimitable oppositions that afflict the inner life that defined his earlier poetics of the will. 5. ASYMMETRIC CONSCIENCE AND THE JUST UNIVERSITY The question of whether the inner struggle, not mediated consensus, is the wellspring of the moral life is a driving political issue at my home institution. How does one balance self-attestation and a sense of belonging to the wider

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social whole at a time when the modern university appears captive to the dictates of the marketplace, not the communal values on which higher learning in the West is purportedly founded? Are the ideals of the Just University realizable in a society where shared notions of the common good have been undermined by academia’s singular goal of maximizing financial profitability at the expense of cultivating values outside the sphere of money, influence, and power? Ricoeur is famous for writing that the journey to moral selfhood and equitable societies consists of “aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions.”33 But how does one pursue “the ‘good life’ with and for others” when the moral supports for supposedly “just institutions,” such as higher learning institutions, have become unstable, if not rotted away altogether by the corrosive influence of neoliberal economic models?34 This question is particularly poignant for me where I teach: Swarthmore College, a highly acclaimed Quaker-heritage university that prizes social responsibility as central to its mission. I have a love-hate relationship to my much-adored, but, in my judgment, fundamentally wrong-headed institutional habitat. Many of the Swarthmore students I teach now comprehend, bitterly, that our society’s continued dependence on fossil-fuel burning to power our economy has driven us into a climatological cul-de-sac. Today, the dangers of this global impasse are underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic—a pandemic originating from and driven by our continued abuse of the planet and its inhabitants—which is one more instance of the deadly impacts our extraction economy has wrought. These students, and their compatriots elsewhere, are leading the political movement in higher learning institutions to divest university endowments from the coal, oil, and gas extraction industry through nonviolent, direct-action takeovers and sit-ins of campuses everywhere. At Swarthmore, I and others have encouraged our students to act ethically and decisively out of the fullness of their liberal education—an education that stresses intellectual rigor and moral accountability. We believe it is wrong that Swarthmore’s $2 billion endowment is significantly invested in the very industry that is destroying the life-support systems that make possible and viable human civilization as we know it. If Swarthmore’s goal is to teach students to think critically and responsibly in a changing world, then it should not be surprising that these very same students now decry the college’s investments in an industry that poses a mortal threat to planetary well-being. Swarthmore students and I understand the importance of this historical moment. We will continue to use all of the tactical tools at our disposal— taking over administrative offices, disrupting classes, weeks-long fasting, appeals to donors to stop funding the college—to persuade Swarthmore’s oversight board and administration to align all of its actions—including its financial dealings—to the one goal of moving the college and the wider society toward a healthy, verdant, fossil fuel–free future.

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For my part, this is a painful time for me at my university. My advocacy of a “gift” economy that prizes renewable resources rather than a “cancer” economy that champions economic growth at all costs has frayed long-term friendships with administrative staff and faculty. At times, I feel like a pariah among my professional colleagues. But now that a growing list of institutions, including the oil-rich Rockefeller Brothers Fund, have pledged to rid themselves of their fossil-fuel holdings, we recognize how sad and ironic it is that Swarthmore College—a Quakerly college, an aspirant to the lofty principles of the Just University, a socially minded university once lauded for its pathbreaking leadership in the abolitionist, suffragist, civil rights, and LGBTQ movements—has become hopelessly mired in the morally bankrupt and financially risky fossil-fuel business. Instead of leading the charge into a green future divorced from the toxic extraction industry, hidebound Swarthmore is fighting a rearguard action to stop the wider society’s and its own inevitable transition into a postoil economy. We all know that this changeover is coming: either my college and global civilization will initiate this transition willingly, or nature will drive us to our knees and compel us to make this transition against our wills. So students and I continue to implore Swarthmore College to become the Just University by aligning its assets with its values, to stand on the right side of history, and to use its enormous wealth and moral capital for the common good by combating the scourge of humancaused climate tragedy in our time. Is the internal conversation of the self with itself a level-headed process by which opposing options are weighed in the balance and a rational decision is then made in a deliberative fashion? Or is this colloquy less a dialogue between friends and more a disputation between combatants, as I increasingly feel at my home university, where the type of direct-action, acrimonious, and perhaps irreconcilable ethical dilemmas faced by Bonhoeffer are oftentimes the norm? In the lonely effort to work out the meaning and truth of one’s ownmost and oftentimes antisocial sense of the good, is there a place in Ricoeur for a primordial rupture of the shared realities and traditions that bind one to the sensus communis? Is not conscience often the voice of a profound sense of communal unrelatedness—of the totaliter aliter in extremis—that allows persons to press beyond the confines and orthodoxies of their customary social groups in order to realize new expressions of truth and goodness? At times, Ricoeur’s moderating appeal to the voice of conscience—whatever the ultimate origins of this voice—appears too sanguine about the subject’s interior capacity to arbitrate between social and political extremes in a manner that appears fair and even-handed for all parties. With regard to the ultimate limit questions of the moral life—the life-and-death issues faced by Abraham at Mount Moriah, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Bonhoeffer in warravaged Germany, or today’s fossil fuel civil disobedience movement in the

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face of climate catastrophe and the coronavirus pandemic—these questions appear to be less like candidates for an inner colloquy and more like disputants in an ongoing struggle over irreconcilable ideals and choices. Indeed, such questions arguably escape dissymmetric circularity in which disagreements between self and other presuppose a common framework of understanding and move toward asymmetric irresolvability where disagreements founder on the rocks of aphronetic incoherence. In my judgment, Ricoeur’s magisterial philosophy of the summoned self—a self enjoined through the medium of conscience to balance justice and love, self and other, dissent and consensus—must be broadened by a deeper appreciation of the ceaseless and abyssal chaos that lies at the mad center of the moral heart.

NOTES 1. Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971). 2. Paul Ricoeur, Living Up to Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 69. 3. Paul Ricoeur, “Naming God,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. by David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 217–35. 4. Paul Ricoeur, “The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 263. 5. Anselm, et al. St. Anselm’s Proslogion: With a Reply on Behalf of the Fool (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980). 6. Michael Sohn, The Good of Recognition Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricoeur (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 95–122. 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn, ProQuest Ebook Central (The Floating Press, 2009), 34. 8. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 355. 9. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 24. 10. Ricoeur, Living Up to Death, 69. 11. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 1–39, 125–39, 297–356; cf. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” Philosophy Today 35, no 1 (spring 1991): 73–81. 12. Paul Ricoeur, “From Metaphysics to Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 40, no. 4 (winter 1996): 453–455, emphasis original. 13. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 355. 14. Ricoeur, “The Summoned Subject,” 272. 15. Ricoeur, “The Summoned Subject,” 267.

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16. Emmanuel Lévinas, “God and Philosophy,” in The Lévinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 184. 17. Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Kluwer, 1991), 112. 18. Lévinas, Otherwise than Being, 114. 19. Paul Ricoeur, “Emmanuel Lévinas: Thinker of Testimony,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 341. 20. Ricoeur, “Emmanuel Lévinas,” 126. 21. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 329–356. 22. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 23. Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 154. 24. Ricoeur, The Just, 155. 25. Ricoeur, The Just, 155, emphasis original. 26. Ricoeur, The Just, 155. 27. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 166. 28. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 166. 29. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Neville Horton Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 339–353. 30. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 245. 31. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison: The Enlarged Edition, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Reginald Fuller et al. (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 4–12. 32. Lori Brandt Hale, “From Loving Enemies to Acting Responsibly: Forgiveness in the Life and Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Word and World 27, no. 1 (winter 2007): 84. 33. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 172. 34. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 172.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anselm, et al. St. Anselm’s Proslogion: With a Reply on behalf of the Fool. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Roger Crisp. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. Edited by Eberhard Bethge. Translated by Neville Horton Smith. New York: Macmillan, 1965. ———. Letters and Papers from Prison: The Enlarged Edition. Edited by Eberhard Bethge and Translated by Reginald Fuller et al. New York: Touchstone, 1997. Hale, Lori Brandt. “From Loving Enemies to Acting Responsibly: Forgiveness in the Life and Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” Word and World 27, no. 1 (winter 2007): 79–87.

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Ihde, Don. Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn. ProQuest Ebook Central. The Floating Press. 2009. Lévinas, Emmanuel. “God and Philosophy.” In The Lévinas Reader. Edited by Seán Hand, 166–189. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989. ———. The Lévinas Reader. Edited by Seán Hand. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989. ———. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Boston: Kluwer, 1991. Ricoeur, Paul. “Emmanuel Lévinas: Thinker of Testimony.” In Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace and translated by David Pellauer, 108–126. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. ———. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace and translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. ———. “From Metaphysics to Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy Today 40, no. 4 (winter 1996): 443–458. ———. The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. Living Up to Death. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. ———. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ———. “Naming God.” In Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace and translated by David Pellauer, 217–235. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. ———. “Narrative Identity.” Philosophy Today 35, no 1 (spring 1991): 73–81. ———. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. “The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation.” In Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace and Translated by David Pellauer, 262–275. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. ———. The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon, 1967. Sohn, Michael. The Good of Recognition Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricoeur. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014.

FOR FURTHER READING Lévinas, Emmanuel. “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition.” In The Lévinas Reader. Edited by Seán Hand, 190–210. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989. ———. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alfonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

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Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. ———. “Philosophy and Religious Language.” In Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace and Translated by David Pellauer, 35–47. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. ———. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. ———. “Theonomy and/or Autonomy.” In The Future of Theology: Essays in Honor of Jürgen Moltmann. Edited by Miroslav Wolf, et al., 284–298. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996. ———. “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation.” Harvard Theological Review 70, no 1/2 (Jan.–Apr. 1977): 1–37. Wallace, Mark I. The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1990.

Chapter 2

Reading Ricoeur Together Interpretive Work and Surplus Meaning in a Just Pedagogy Charles A. Gillespie

INTRODUCTION Distances can become productive. Such a promise underwrote the sudden beginning of our collective hiatus in March 2020 as all of us, the academic community included, responded to the coronavirus pandemic. University classes moved to digital platforms to limit the number of people in close proximity, with the assumption that classes need not be physically together in one place or time. Pedagogy was at the vanguard of “social distancing.” Teachers and students could continue classes while from home with shared screens and video chat replacing shared classrooms and dormitories. But the looming threat of the pandemic forced coursework to the internet with astonishing speed. Alongside so many other habits refigured by social distance, digital learning transplanted our ordinarily embodied experiences to a new delivery mechanism. Why should we continue to read and talk together, then, if university courses can be so easily uprooted from our naturalized habitats: seminar tables, library stacks, study rooms, chalk dust, and white boards? Pedagogically, we know that reading and talking contour the day-to-day labors of a university course: discerning some new meaning behind an object of study, permitting those discoveries to influence praxis and personal choices, and sharing one’s own discoveries with others in the form of comments, questions, compositions, and applications. A course’s basic tasks are hermeneutical: every course develops some set of interpretive skills that apply as much to course subject matters as they do to lived experiences. University courses take a good deal of effort to design, implement, and undergo; part of this labor is the work of 33

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interpretation shared by instructors and students. All classwork requires what I call “interpretive work.” Holding our interpretive work at social distances raises questions about what makes up a just pedagogy. Learning happens as an event that differs from the transmission of other products. Unlike grocery or package delivery, a just pedagogy cannot become “contactless delivery.” Just pedagogy guides the contact between people reading and talking together that makes a university course different from other, solitary forms of learning. Rather than deliver “learning” as its self-contained product, I argue that a just pedagogy ensures productive distances so interpretive work in collaboration can generate new and human meaning. Just pedagogy opens up collaborative questions rather than delivers singular answers. This chapter develops my account of “just pedagogy” through three interlocking engagements with interpretive work and surplus meaning inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s theories of interpretation and justice.1 Ricoeur’s interpretation theory provides a framework to talk about a human meaning in excesses: friendships, moral development, parallel insight, increased clarity of purpose, changed plans, and new applications. Such excesses derive from the very same practices that make meaning by interpreting course content. Reading together generates a surplus of meanings, both in expected learning and in a classroom’s unpredictable delights. The first section of this chapter uses Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to treat pedagogy and coursework as interpretive work. Regardless of a course’s disciplinary location or preferred teaching strategies, pedagogy organizes interpretive work in a shared, human situation. The second part identifies the responsibilities of just pedagogy within that social situation. A just pedagogy balances shared learning objectives and personal transformation. The third section demonstrates tactics for just pedagogy that diminish alienation through productive distances and interpretive hospitality. I propose two concrete applications in syllabus design and questions based on Ricoeur’s Interpretation Theory. A just pedagogy shifts the definition of “productive” to the ongoing event of interpretation and so confronts rampant anxieties, both for teachers and students, about all this interpretive work’s relevance, its human meaning. 1. LEARNING TOGETHER: INTERPRETIVE WORK AND EXCESSIVE MEANING No single course could ever provide enough training for all the myriad skills necessary for a flourishing human life, but every university course develops skills of interpretation. Pedagogy differs from the simple representation of ideas. Teaching interprets materials when classwork translates a text into

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another more accessible media, whether lecture, slides, videos, or handouts. Teachers open a way of interpreting by providing a bit of background to the author’s biography or a reading’s social, historical, and linguistic context. All of a course’s many activities ultimately aim to help students’ understanding of course content and themselves. Pedagogy models and enacts interpretation when teaching guides others to form their own response to a shared phenomenon. Like hermeneutics, pedagogy seeks new understanding. For students, the objects or styles or contexts of a course’s interpretation appears new; for teachers, every student in every class presents a new partner for meaningmaking, even with well-trod materials. Ricoeur’s interpretation theory foregrounds interpretive work as a collective, human endeavor. Pedagogy creates the conditions for learning together that produces meanings qualitatively and quantitatively different than those derived from interpreting alone. Pedagogy Guides the Interpretive Work of Learning A theory of just pedagogy begins by recognizing this fundamental work of interpretation that undergirds all learning. Learning happens through what I call interpretive work. We learn by making new and present meaning from an encounter with an object distinct from ourselves. So “learning” describes an appropriation of relevant meaning akin to how Ricoeur’s hermeneutics talks about “understanding” and “application” as “appropriation.” Something distant and strange transfigures into something familiar and relevant to me and my experience in the here and now. “This goal is achieved insofar as interpretation actualizes the meaning of the text for the present reader.”2 Learning both collects discrete bits of fact and develops practices to apply new skills. I can learn the letters of a new alphabet, but I can also learn how to read, write, and speak a new language. A course not only presents new content and methods to interpret and assimilate these new ideas for immediate applications (in order to pass an exam or compose an essay) but also provides ways to make these discoveries continually relevant and meaningful for future and unforeseen applications. Relevant and meaningful learning happens through coursework because interpretation requires work. My assertion “interpretation requires work” states a corollary to Ricoeur’s dictum “the text is mute.”3 No text interprets itself; every reader must first pick up and read. The same can be said for “reading” stories or architecture or politics or music or historical narratives: any encounter with an object prompts interpretive work to build and share its meanings. The cycle continues because further interpretations require further work. Gathering together to read, discuss, disagree, and struggle with a text performs that work of interpretation in space and time (as in a particular session of a seminar) and interpretive work also expands and develops over time (as in moments of

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lecture that recall previous topics or in student reflection that comes to fruition in writing). Teachers do not bestow preexisting meaning onto a concept that students then will to grasp in understanding. Rather, teachers enact interpretations and equip students with capacities to do their own interpretive work. Each act of interpretation generates more and more meaning. Pedagogy directs all of this abundance of meaning toward learning objectives. On the one hand, pedagogy demonstrates interpretation to inspire others’ own interpretive work. On the other hand, teachers gather the various interpretations offered by students and organize them in a common direction. Pedagogy keeps the wild and unruly possibilities of interpretation in line with learning. For Ricoeur, interpretation projects meaning “conceived in a dynamic way as the direction of thought opened up by the text. In other words, what has to be appropriated is nothing other than the power of disclosing a world that constitutes the reference of the text.”4 Interpretation inhabits lines of thinking and possibility and welcomes the interpreter to perform them anew. Consider the paradigmatic case in theatrical reading: the actor supplies some “direction” in a “dynamic way” that actualizes the “meaning of the text” as a “power” to “disclose a world.” Actors make interpretive choices that work to create the world of the play by “projecting” it onto stage. The same sorts of interpretive choices characterize any event of interpretation. Just as the play’s director ensures that every actor’s differing interpretation fits together, so too does the teacher orient student interpretations toward the coherence of a learning objective. Attention to interpretation changes how tasks like “reading and writing” operate in learning. Meaningful learning arises from doing the interpretive work that pedagogy guides. “Reading and writing” describe practices working objects into discourse and practices crafting works of discourse. Working discourse and works of discourse are “the central problem at stake” for Interpretation Theory, “in particular, that of language as a work.”5 For Ricoeur, works of language signify two related concepts. First, language works out meaning in an event. “Reading” does interpretive work that brings some static object into the dynamics of living discourse much like how the play “comes to life” in performance. Texts only communicate when read by a reader. But how did the text come to be? Ricoeur’s second sort of work operates like “writing,” the product of an event that makes a work of language. “Language is submitted to the rules of a kind of craftsmanship, which allows us to speak of production and works of art, and, by extension of works of discourse. . . . Text means discourse both as inscribed and wrought.”6 A wrought piece of text might now be interpreted (“read”) akin to a work of art, as an object different, distinct, and apart from its artist.7 The interpretive work of reading and writing are both made present in what Ricoeur calls an “event of language.”8

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Pedagogy guides “events of language” into new relations to produce meaningful learning. For Ricoeur, the “event of language” simply defines discourse.9 Words make their meaning in terms of their relationships together, not as discrete and atomized linguistic markers. Here we locate Ricoeur’s governing principle that the sentence, rather than the word, is the fundamental and irreducible unit of discourse.10 The point can be pressed for Ricoeur to claim, “If all discourse is actualized as an event, all discourse is understood as meaning.”11 Pedagogy models and guides the interpretive work that actualizes the discourse of a course by making course materials meaningful to those taking the course. Meaning and learning therefore depend on the relationships between course content, both its materials and its participants. Meaningful Relationships More than uncovering something hidden within course content, interpretive work produces meaning in the discourse that happens between human interpreters. Relationality points out how interpretive work done together necessarily generates more meaning than interpretive work done alone. Relationships matter for pedagogy thanks to its social situations: the classroom community, university, and disciplinary contexts. The first social situation where interpretive work becomes relational happens during class. Discussions and lectures place the work of interpretation into a relational event, and pedagogy manages learning in this social situation. Whether as the instructor or as a student in a university course, I do interpretive work with its content. I also interpret this content alongside and with others. Discourse happens in the middle, in the distance between me, other participants, and our shared object of study. Events of language form new relations across that distance. Classroom discourse—whether embodied dialogue enacted in real time with others or writing meant to be shared and engaged with a class community—helps differentiate the communal orientation of a course’s interpretive work from interpretive commentary for its own sake. Clarifications, comments, frustrations, and delights open new avenues for the whole group rather than oneself alone. In this way, all of the interpretive work of a course serves ends larger than one individual’s understanding or comprehension. Wider university relationships further govern how pedagogy frames class discourse and interpretive work to fit within larger social structures. Every student encounters a course differently, to be sure. Even if offered in multiple sections, individual instructors determine how content will be studied and a course’s narrative arc, procedures, and objectives. The instructor’s pedagogy creates the in-class-world students encounter—but this is only part of the puzzle. Courses also must fit together in the interplay of departments,

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requirements, colleges, majors, programs, accreditation expectations, and curricula. Students take courses in order to fit this set of strange, new ideas into a supervised pathway. Whether dogmatically enforced or loosely interpreted, the rules of the registrar and the regulations of funding bodies infect and affect pedagogical choices. Every course lives within a wider university ecosystem, one that encompasses support staff (from instructional technologies to custodial services and food), administration, entertainment, athletics, and an array of disciplinary departments and professional schools. The same can be said for the way pedagogy keeps a course attuned to the competing methods of scholarly fields. Interpreting acclimates knowledge to its context and so allows that knowledge to be shared between seemingly estranged university functions as well as differing departments and scholarly guilds. Interpretive work overcomes alienation from a new object of study when we begin to feel at home despite distance.12 Feeling at home appears differently in different contexts. The same can be said for interpretive strategies and pedagogical approaches in differing realms of study.13 Ricoeur helps to coalesce the apparent contradiction between scientific and humanistic pedagogies by locating interpretation within a dialectical relationship between explanations and understandings. For Ricoeur, interpretation arises in the interplay between explanation (i.e., erklären with its “paradigmatic field of application in the natural sciences”) and understanding (i.e., verstehen with its “originary field of application in the human sciences”).14 Explanation and understanding work together when interpretation encompasses the dynamic processes that produce communicable meaning. One interprets in order to become familiar with that which is beyond one’s own experience. Ricoeur’s dialectic between erklären and verstehen plays irreducible variations in harmonic tension. To understand the significance of synaptic nerves requires knowing about their function in biological and electrical terms, but even an exhaustive explanation of the nervous system will elude total understanding of the experience of consciousness. Understanding why differs from explaining how, but these questions remain inextricably related. Interpretation enacts human engagement with and relationship to materiality and ideas. Knowledge comes bound up in some ability to interpret and make another world known to myself and to others. Interpretive work projects this new world to be shared and reinvestigated. Surpluses and Human Meaning The projection of a new world “in front of the text” happens in excess of the object of interpretation.15 As an event that projects a new world, interpretive work generates more meaning than could be anticipated or intended by a procedure or method. Interpretive work does not passively decode something

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latent; the work of discourse actively produces meanings with the “disclosure of new modes of being . . . new forms of life.”16 Ricoeur rightly calls that which is “newly” produced by every instance of interpretive work a surplus because interpretive work does not exhaust its subject from the potential to make more meaning. Consider the exemplary case of metaphor in the third essay of Interpretation Theory. Ricoeur focuses on the surplus of meaning characteristic to literary works thanks to their “semantic ambiguity.”17 Literary interpretations depend on making distinctions between what Ricoeur identifies as literal and metaphorical meanings. Interpretation does not abandon literal meaning in order to seek out symbolic meaning; interpretation, rather, works out meanings alongside and in addition to the literal. Metaphors are not interpreted so their literal and symbolic meanings compete as contradictions. Interpretation engages the symbols produced by discursive work and further works them out to produce ever greater surpluses of meaning. Symbols exceed the potential of their material or literal signification.18 The generation of a surplus of meaning makes greater sense in a teachable demonstration that foregrounds interpretive work’s human and social situation. Ricoeur rather confusingly calls surplus meaning “the residue of the literal interpretation.”19 Ricoeur’s poetic construction invites confusion because even reading for the “plain sense” of a text or hunting for “just the facts” (his so-called “literal interpretation”) nevertheless requires interpretive work. No plain sense or facts float apart from an interpreting context or interpreting persons! A class can show these surpluses in a game of charades. A hand can symbolize a telephone (barring cybernetics, here would be an instance of Ricoeur’s “metaphorical meaning”) without ceasing to simultaneously signify a body part (the hand’s materiality would be Ricoeur’s “literal meaning”). At the very same time, body parts can move with shrug of uncertainty without contradiction to their signification as shoulders, arms, and hands. Placed into the context of a guessing game about short-lived pop music hits, a coordinated flow of such gestures could prompt a partner to notice the title of the song, “Call Me Maybe.” Interpretive work generates new meanings for the hand-phone and the noncommittal open palm in excess of “moving body parts” without ever negating their “literal” or “material” meanings. Like charades, interpretation of texts can continue to work with and on residual materiality left behind by its letters.20 When texts are handled, they carry both expected meanings and a promise for more. Objects of study remain sticky with ever greater potential for new meaning. Textual residue can be gathered, refined, and processed into a surplus greater than the sum of a literal interpretation like the way sap exceeds the self-contained particularity of the tree. Even still, further surplus meaning in syrup’s sweetness will not cancel literal meaning manifested on sticky fingers.

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The very same interpretive work that learns from course content generates a personal surplus. In the end, the most important human dimension of interpretive work is this influence on the interpreting subject. The working out of discourse is also a working out of one’s sense of oneself. The surpluses brought about through interpretive work include all of a course’s human meanings. The surplus of a course includes the potential for personal transformations and deepened friendships, discoveries of purpose or vocation, changed aspirations, convictions, values, and life-plans. The interpreter develops as a subject alongside the acquisition of new knowledge; their experience of the world grows with every encounter. Ricoeur explains that interpretation “gives to the subject a new capacity for knowing himself. If the reference of the text is the project of a world, then it is not the reader who primarily projects himself. The reader is enlarged in his capacity of self-projection by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself.”21 So too, coursework generates surplus meanings beyond what can ever be captured by transcripts, composition, and writing because its work influences the human interpreter.22 Every act of interpretation can become personally transformational. Just pedagogies give interpretive work room for human surpluses to flourish. 2. JUST PEDAGOGY BETWEEN FAIRNESS AND PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION Pedagogy models the norms for interpretive work in a university course, and I suggested that just pedagogies guide interpretive work to generate a surplus of human meaning alongside knowledge about course content. What, then, makes this sort of human-focused pedagogy “just”? I contend that just pedagogies balance course content and requirements with an openness toward personal transformation as a surplus. For Ricoeur, the just organizes how goods are to be divided, moved, and shared between people and how the conflicts that arise in social life can be resolved without resorting to violence.23 As such, justice occurs from an interplay between strict “deontological” adherence to shared laws and “teleological” focus on a good, human life.24 A framework for justice derived from Ricoeur’s short lecture on “Justice between the Legal and the Good” locates what I call a just pedagogy between its own spectrum of the “legal” and the “good,” between polarities of course content and social fairness and human meaning and personal transformation. Just pedagogy establishes and achieves stated learning objectives in fidelity to course content. At the “legal” pole of a just pedagogy, there are institutional boundaries comprised of those laws enshrined in university requirements, obligations, and policies. Just pedagogy must adhere to the scope laid out for a course’s institutional and social ecosystem. Weeks upon

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weeks spent “off topic” violates justice because classes need to cover what they promise to cover. The course syllabus functions as an overt “social contract.” It lays out assessment procedures for evaluating how and if participant learning matches expectations and establishes the content and materials a course’s interpretive work will explore. The same can be said about maintaining focus on subject matter in conversation and writing. A just pedagogy anchors the boundless potential for human meaning-making within the finite possibilities of the interpreted object. Creative freedom for interpretation relies on meanings made on the subject matter’s own terms. For Ricoeur, “if it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal. The text presents a limited field of possible constructions.”25 Objects of study present themselves as raw materials for interpretive work that explodes outwards and inspires cooperation. Just pedagogies resist a vision of interpretation that mines, dissects, or extracts hidden secrets, whether interrogating the author lurking “behind the text” or diagnosing the ideology that informs another’s comments.26 Attention to subject matter allows classrooms to welcome all participants with equity and fairness, but I hold that a just pedagogy goes beyond a fair pedagogy. Given the human orientation of interpretive work and its excesses, a just pedagogy resists uniformity. Students should enter the classroom as real peers. Fairness controls for bias in evaluation and ensures inclusivity of access to knowledge and participation. Fair pedagogies ensure that students depart from a class with an equitable experience and similar “knowledge.” But a just pedagogy diminishes bias and increases inclusivity of access to knowledge and participation. When pedagogical justice equates with pedagogical fairness, a university course can only produce a set of predetermined and measurable outcomes. Learning objectives function as limits. Just pedagogies frame learning objectives as the course’s “contractual” baseline but seek to generate surpluses beyond this agreed minimum. These surpluses keep a university course human. Without attention to a classroom’s human excesses, pedagogy seeks only the efficient transference of data. Efficient pedagogies maximize the amount of information students can download into memory and minimize the effort in professorial labor to upload that information into student’s minds. Efficiency reduces friction to increase the speed of output. A course looks to its measurable products: high marks on tests and course evaluations with speedy completion. A “frictionless” course experience differs from just pedagogy because it mystifies the human work of interpretation and its human meaning. Ironically, aiming for “frictionless” pedagogies can make classes boring for students to take and teachers to lead; fun, after all, is a surplus. Requirements to prove mastery over the material pile up busywork that fills quotas rather than produce new

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insights. At their most insidious, data-transfer pedagogies treat students as subjects for ideological indoctrination. These overly “legalistic” pedagogies put all of the emphasis on “learning” course content and so ignore the interpretive work of the humans who make up a university course. Such approaches fail to “do justice” because they presume an ideal scenario wherein all students are identical. The problem, here, is that just pedagogy is not coterminous with practices that distribute knowledge as if the content of a course existed in scarce and exchangeable resources. Certainly, students learn some of the content of a class from the interpretations offered by the instructor. But overly legalistic pedagogical theories turn teachers into logistics managers for knowledge distribution and students into receptacles and consumers. Pedagogy too indebted to the “legal” pole imagines the work of a course happening in abstraction from the humans who occupy a classroom’s space and time. Teachers can tailor conversation to the needs of the situation or historical moment. A just pedagogy consistently turns attention back to the present people who do the interpretive work of a university course. At the other pole, the “good” looks to how any course transforms those people that take it. Just pedagogy includes all participants and assures the good of their particular learning. Every university course leads to individual personal growth as well as an increase in understanding and knowledge. Attention to the interpreter as well as the products and skills of interpretation distinguish a university course from other educational opportunities.27 Minimally, every course requires its participants to undergo some sort of change. The most common version of this change increases one’s subject matter expertise and develops a set of disciplines and skills. Far rarer and far more precious are those classroom experiences that change the direction of a participant’s life. Keeping within the framework of the “good” ensures that practices of just pedagogy attend to some transformation in each and every participant. As such, a pedagogical “good” cannot be identical for each participant, whether student or faculty. At first, it might appear odd to identify any risks to justice associated with an exclusive focus on human transformation. Overly personalized pedagogies, however, fail to do justice to subject matters. Attempting to cause personal transformation as pedagogy’s end presumes that all content prompts identical and universalizable meanings. Problems arise when pedagogy disengages from working together with course content toward merely working on course participants. Course content functions as a convenient excuse for something else. Just pedagogy is not coterminous with therapeutic intervention, intellectual-spiritual direction, or educational entertainment. Just pedagogy certainly might also be therapeutic, shape the contours of interior life, and cause genuine enjoyment. My point is to argue that such wonders

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come about as just pedagogy’s surplus meanings. Excellent teachers possess the interpersonal skills and empathy to adapt their style for individualized learning, but a just pedagogy resists the impulse to transition toward personal work that disregards content and subject matters as if they were superfluous or interchangeable. A just pedagogy respects the distinction between challenging participants and forcing students to submit to a worldview. At their extreme, overly personal pedagogies risk the same indoctrination and obscure the same excesses as overly legalistic pedagogies. Just pedagogy needs to “do justice” to the topics at hand by consistently turning attention back to its present subject matter. A just pedagogy, then, guides interpretative work that “does justice” both to subject matters and to participants. A just pedagogy looks both toward content and university situation (the “legal” requirements of a just pedagogy) and toward the particular flourishing of the people involved in a course (the “good” requirements of a just pedagogy). Attention to the freedom of content and human interpreters leads just pedagogy to embrace the theme of autonomy in Ricoeur’s interpretation theory. Balance between fairness and personal transformation occurs when just pedagogy creates and maintains the distances that interpretive work makes productive. Such distance appears in an environment characterized by what I call interpretive hospitality. 3. JUST PEDAGOGY AND PRODUCTIVE DISTANCES: PRACTICES FOR INTERPRETIVE HOSPITALITY A just pedagogy makes distances productive of new meanings in contexts and over time through practices of interpretive hospitality. Hospitality welcomes the stranger as guest into a particular context. Like the relationship between guest and host, interpretive hospitality never seeks to undo the autonomy of interpreted objects by reducing meaning to what can be easily assimilated or a singular encounter. Interpretation bridges the distance between the interpreter and object, akin to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s fusion of horizons.28 Ricoeur therefore claims that “Interpretation, philosophically understood, is nothing else than an attempt to make estrangement and distanciation productive.”29 Interpretation transforms the terror or wonder or stupor prompted by unknown difference—experiences of “estrangement and distanciation”—into possibility for meaning. Distance between interpreter and object enables interpretive work. I have also shown how a course’s interpretive work creates more than what might be called the literal meaning of course “content.” Interpretation generates this surplus meaning precisely because the object of interpretation sits at a distance from the interpreter as an autonomous work. Literal distance

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separates books from the eyes that read in the same way debates over military blunders or strategic ingenuity happen at historical distances from their battlefields. Distance cleaves the work away from its composer. A similar sort of content-autonomy informs a classroom: the subject of a course needs to be distinct from the subjectivity of its interpreters. The following section proposes three strategies for maximizing surplus meaning through productive distances that shift requirements into opportunities for re-query. New Questions in Context: Interpretive Hospitality and the Spirit of Welcome The first strategy establishes an environment of interpretive hospitality. Actualizing meaning and projecting new worlds requires hospitality both to unknown texts and to unknown partners in the work of interpretation. The cooperative work of just pedagogy is an exercise in discourse; no one is in this alone. A question remains, however, if those realizations and relationships will be alienated from the labor that generates them. The projection of a new world through interpretive work includes a transformation of memory, emotion, and relationality. Ricoeur writes, “For me, the world is the ensemble of references opened up by every kind of text, descriptive or poetic, that I have read, understood, and loved.”30 A just pedagogy infuses a course’s “ensemble of references” with a sense of fondness and familiarity. Interpretive hospitality primarily welcomes what we learn from wrong answers. Fear of mistakes estranges interpretive work through the dread of misinterpretation. This fear derives from a myopic notion of distance and productivity. When productivity indexes to preconditions, interpretive work either achieves or fails to find the correct answer. “Productivity” belongs only to interpretive work whose generated meanings align perfectly with objectives; it reduces interpretive work to confirming knowledges already acquired. Classroom anxieties may hover around embarrassment at misreading. Just pedagogy, however, encourages misunderstandings, uncertainty, and confusion as part of a process that encounters new and unintended meanings. Interpretive work becomes drudgery when limited to meeting quotas and fulfilling requirements, whether these are pre-requisite courses for applied work later on (such as a nursing major’s study of biological chemistry) or general education “requirements” that provide a foundation. Interpretive hospitality transitions from the potential alienation of a missed requirement into opportunities to invite new questions: re-query. Re-query crafts the spirit of welcome that encourages reading together. Often a spirit of welcome gets configured simply in praise for “mutual respect,” “keeping an open mind,” and “reading charitably.” Such basic values allow students, instructors, and content from a plurality of perspectives

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to feel included. But what prompts a feeling of safety and inclusion for some members of a class community may raise feelings of alienation for others. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics assists just pedagogies to incorporate these values and press beyond hospitality’s affective register. Rather, the spirit of welcome names one of the surplus meanings generated through shared interpretive work. Critical attention to context distinguishes interpretive hospitality from a simpler charitable reading, glossed with the call to engage only “the best possible version” of an author’s argument. Reading with charity intends to work out a plausible interpretation on the object’s own contextual grounds. Interpretive hospitality begins with charitable reading but adjusts for new contexts because an object encountered carries its own autonomy as a work of discourse.31 Together, a class “reads” a text or painting or film or historical case in the new context of the course. In other words, the content of a class session—whether it be a text, film, painting, narrative, poem, or theory— remains like a guest with its own history and its own futures. As Ricoeur writes, “the text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text means now matters more than what the author meant when he wrote it.”32 Just pedagogies guide reading together that “actualizes the meaning of the text for the present reader.”33 Interpretive hospitality allows a present context to ask new questions. Interpretive hospitality differs, too, from a sort of charitable reading that demands assent to the world projected by content. Hospitality also places obligations on a guest. In this way, course disciplines, policies, and values function as microcosmic extensions of a university’s macrocosmic mission and culture to set the parameters for interpretive work. I have already said that a just pedagogy takes seriously the restrictions put on inquiry by disagreements and worldviews operating in the interpreting community as well as the limits imposed by the legible boundaries of the object interpreted.34 A survey lecture welcomes different sorts of investigative depth from an upper-level seminar. At the same time, that introductory survey can model a wider array of examples and demonstrate a sustained viewpoint. A course required of all students welcomes different sorts of applications than a course limited only to specialists in a pre-professional discipline. Interpretive hospitality welcomes questions again and again by turning requery outwards. A self-serving question—that is, a question that seeks clarification for my own understanding—can spark new questions or understanding for others. Framing questions as an element of collaborative interpretive work encourages students to welcome their own anxieties about looking or sounding foolish. At the same time, framing questions as an element of collaborative interpretive work can refine the narrow concerns of a student who dominates conversational airtime. These need not be utopian hopes; grading

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rubrics might encourage generative questions (those that call for further interpretive work) over leading questions that anticipate their own answers. Interpretive hospitality makes every question relevant when they work out contemporary or personal applications as a surplus to understanding the content. Questions situate the class event within its historical and social location without turning personal investment into a crude emotivism, virtue signaling, or presentism. Hospitality toward questions, especially those rich with human meaning and local significance, highlight the purpose of university interpretive work as a shared endeavor. Ricoeur’s insight into meanings made for the present show how every text might be interpreted to be relevant to what happens here and now. Indeed, if we follow Ricoeur, the responsibility for relevance lies in the interpreter’s work. Course materials might even become a site to think through feelings and political positions from an unexpected angle across the space opened by distance between interpreters and their object. A commitment to hospitality guides questions to prompt an expansive dialogue that includes more and more participants. Interpretive Hospitality and Distances of Time Course contexts also include multiple, cooperating temporalities: the distances between sessions, the composite length of a course, and beyond its conclusion. Interpretive hospitality requires preparation that can be re-queried in future application. Pedagogy guides interpretive work occurring at these differing moments in time: some before, some during, and some after each class. Ricoeur suggests that “The omnitemporality of a text is open to anyone who can read.”35 A text makes meaning in an original context but retains a capacity to make unintended meanings in perpetuity. So too, every session of a course makes meanings that compound across a life. Instructors, students, and content converge only to disperse. Just pedagogy diminishes alienation in each “present” moment of interpretive work by marking the productive distinctions between their modes of distance: the individual interpretive work of preparation before class, the collaborative interpretive work during a class session, and applications across sessions that look toward interpretive work in the future. Before class, learning starts in the self-directed labor of preparation. Practices of “charitable reading” belong to preparatory interpretive work, for both students and instructors because interpretive hospitality begins with fidelity to the text’s own possibilities. My own initial interpretation (which involves the context of the course I design—what readings have preceded this one, what overall questions I ask) opens the door, as it were, to invite the text as a stranger. Individual interpretive work happens “freely” prior to the collaborative interpretive work of a class session. Reading for class serves

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the end of discourse with others. Both participants and instructors should recognize how their preparatory reading includes a social responsibility. When individual interpretive work influences class discourse with classmates, it distinguishes preparation from busywork. During class, the transition from requirement to re-query plays out in the transition from obligatory preparation (perhaps indexed to an assignment) to the free questioning associated with collaborative interpretive work.36 Ricoeur’s hermeneutics offers insight: an object’s meanings have not been exhausted by the interpretive work that prepares for a class session. So too, potential meanings will not be exhausted by the collaborative interpretive work of the session. Pedagogy shapes this collaborative event that crosses the distance between interpretations. What Ricoeur’s hermeneutics calls the “present” figures in pedagogy as a moment of collaborative interpretive work. Online learning proves how collaboration need not happen in a simultaneous time and space. The “event” of pedagogy can be synchronous or asynchronous. Collaboration is most obvious during a gathering in physical or cyberspace, but collaboration also occurs in an exercise completed by a student on their own schedule. Pedagogical events permit students and instructors to ask questions across distance. Re-query continues even beyond the end of a given session. Continued questioning follows an expanding horizon of potential meanings that points forward and backward. Reading together that actualizes some meaning now also raises new questions later. The temporalities and context of a course include how its sessions work together. Productive Distance and Syllabus Construction The design of a syllabus can create the conditions for re-query when just pedagogy reflects its locations and participants. A just pedagogy reflects its location and participants. A just pedagogy enforces the rigor of a discipline’s scholarly interpretive work rather than police the subject matters of course content. As such, local practices and values should arbitrate course content with greater authority than the presumptive disciplinary canon. Concretely, an expanding horizon of meaning finds expression in three keys for syllabus creation: recurring questions, space for the surplus of personal development, and juxtaposition. Recurring questions encourages an arc of connections in the development of a course’s content so that inquiry from previous sessions reemerge in dialogue with other content later in the course. Well-constructed course arcs make for more elegant delivery as an element of style, but they also serve the development of students’ reflection. Designing sessions with retrospective and forward-looking content leverages the multiple temporalities of a

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course. Connections and surpluses appear beyond synthetic assignments or that rousing final lecture. Designing sessions so they look backward and forward, rather than as discrete units, slows the haste with which understanding calcifies into acquisition, as if the many meanings of course content could be reduced to a set of memorized facts. Returning to questions opened by other content permits the ongoing realization of students’ changing perspectives. If Ricoeur is right to say that the world disclosing power of a text “gives a self to the ego,” then just pedagogies should make space for interpretive work’s “enlarging of the self” to be noticed in real time.37 Understandings deepen, in terms of both a course’s learning objectives and participants’ self-knowledge. Second, recurring questions and thematic arcs underscore the human meanings at the heart of just pedagogies. By uplifting personal growth (perhaps even transformation) as a surplus, students and instructors are both liberated from the responsibility to intend that outcome. The university classroom remains as hospitable to the student whose encounter with a text or an idea leaves a lasting mark on their life as it does for the student seeking only new data points of knowledge and required course credit. If personal growth can be framed as surplus meaning that accrues across courses, sessions that fall short of “life-changing” need not be considered to fail at primary learning goals. Third, principles of just pedagogy give theoretical ground to emphasize juxtaposition in syllabus construction. The contents of a syllabus should produce some friction. Surprising pairings encountered with interpretive hospitality make distance obvious enough to raise important questions. Readings might be chosen to enhance (rather than mitigate) distanciation and estrangement. Wrestling out surplus meanings by questioning how texts and themes fit together across their distances can be considered an essential rather than accidental part of a course. At the same time, the surplus appears from dialogue between topics, readings, and sessions. Surpluses need distances of time to resist slippage into yet another requirement and yet another objective to be measured. Syllabi can abandon the quest to reconstitute only historical meanings and techniques—as if the pedagogical situation in the eighteenth century paralleled the pedagogical situation of the twenty-first century. Instead, syllabi should prompt opportunities to do interpretive work that challenges participants to determine its relevance as human meaning in the present alongside other historical and social contexts. Interpretation Theory and Collaborative Questions In my own attempts to encourage interpretive hospitality in my undergraduate seminars, I have found Ricoeur’s hermeneutics helps to foreground the

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interpretive work of questions. Looking at the dialectic between explanation and understanding early in the semester provides students with tools to think differently about the purpose of their encounter with strange ideas and thinking alongside new classmates. Ricoeur’s erudition and jargon make sections of Interpretation Theory particularly helpful, and this exercise works equally well in dialogue with short selections from Ricoeur’s text or simply in reference to it.38 I begin by writing “EXPLANATION” and “UNDERSTANDING” on the board as the top and bottom poles of a circle with arrows. While a relatively straightforward diagram for the hermeneutic circle and Ricoeur’s dialectic between erklären pointing toward verhstehen and vice versa, I do not provide this context for this exercise. Instead, I suggest that we can think about questions according to these interlocking ideas. I say that questions of explanation seek after some discrete fact or idea; questions of explanation give us information about the “what” and “how” of a situation. I then suggest that questions of understanding seek after context, purpose, influence, and value; questions of understanding give us information about the “why” of a situation. I then invite students to brainstorm their own questions of explanation and questions of understanding. Accompanied with an unexamined wisecrack about the importance of chairs to any professor’s financial well-being, I point to one of the chairs in the room and ask, “What are some questions of explanation about that chair?” Slowly but surely, students suggest questions like “What materials make up the chair?” and “What color is the chair?” and “How much did this chair cost for the university to purchase?” We sometimes guess at some of the answers to our questions. After each proposed question, we talk about what characteristics made that question a “question of explanation.” Often, students will rightly identify (inadvertently agreeing with Ricoeur) that questions of explanation search for an answer that can be found out in the world of sensory perception. “What color is the chair?” can be explained by noting the chair’s red appearance. We then shift to ask “What are some questions of understanding about that chair?” Such questions often include “Why is the chair in this room?” and “How do chairs affect the way we learn in a classroom?” and “Why is the chair red?” We sometimes speculate about some answers, but we come to acknowledge that questions of understanding may provoke multiple nonidentical answers. After each proposed question, we again describe the characteristics that make that question into a “question of understanding.” Often, some exasperated student will exclaim that understanding “depends” on the situation of the person to whom a question gets asked. Indeed, “questions of understanding” depend, in large part, on the human meaning of the situation, the ways “it will be a little different for everyone.” Discovering the

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importance of meaning “for me” need not concede to simplistic relativism. Instead, students identify the significance of understanding in relation to contexts and particularity. The exercise works best, however, when the class stumbles onto a question that cannot fit neatly into either category. Most often, these are the sort of questions that begin with “who” and “where.” These are the sorts of questions that inform our social life and prove the interdependence of explanation and understanding. “Where are you going?” can be both a question seeking explanation and a question seeking understanding. We can wrap up the exercise by noticing the way questions rely upon each other and open toward others. Questions of explanation provide the foundation to ask questions of understanding, just as questions of understanding can lead us to ask more questions of explanation. I end the exercise by mapping these sorts of questions onto the kinds of inquiry raised during a class session. The goal of questions of explanation such as “What does Ricoeur mean by ‘discourse’ and ‘autonomy’?” or “What role does authorial intention play in Ricoeur’s interpretation theory?” point toward a shared foundation. Questions of understanding help us to place ideas into new contexts: “How does Ricoeur’s theory apply to medical examinations?” or “Why does Ricoeur emphasize written texts and literary theory?” In both cases, questions orient interpretive work toward a common enterprise. CONCLUSION Questions matter as much for others as for ourselves. That is, questions point toward the shared horizon opened by the object of interpretation. Because interpretive work discloses a new world prompted by the text, questions turn us in a common direction. One person is able to make sense of the direction of their own inquiry by hearing someone else’s questions. In a direct application of Ricoeur’s theory, another’s estrangement becomes productive to my own learning. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics offers those doing interpretive work in higher education a chance to see the merit in a mistaken reading and praise the delights of human meaning that appear in continued questions and rereading. Interpretive hospitality not only welcomes a vast array of dialogue partners but also promises more goods in “reading together” than could be imagined reading alone. Just pedagogy unfetters learning from the allure of “productivity.” Ricoeur’s interpretation theory deflates the priority of acquisition as the only end of interpretation or a university course. Interpretive work generates new meanings within a source’s parameters beyond extracting a meaning latent or hidden in the object of study. The same content can be “worked”

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again and again in different contexts and toward different applications. In terms of a university course, work proves productive when teaching questions rather than delivers. In this way, students take ownership of their learning and participate in the practices of a just pedagogy. How will reading together appear after “social distance”? Colleges—etymologically connected to the Latin roots for “together” (the prefix co-) and “reading” (legere)—create a community to organize social life in such a way to encourage the habits of interpretive hospitality. The melancholy of missed traditions and malaise in teleconferenced classes prove the surplus joys of “reading together” are worth protecting. Human meaning calls to be shared, visible in the pleasure of a robust debate or the smile of mutual recognition at the mention of a favorite story. Meaning emerges from these frictions that prompt continuous new insight and re-query. Such surplus meanings come into being over time. Ricoeur’s interpretation theory resists any obligation to know everything whether before or after interpretive work. As Ricoeur describes his notion of the second naïveté: “In short, it is by interpreting that we can hear again.”39 Interpretive work aims to open the capacity to listen anew. Just pedagogy frames every individual’s encounter with a text as an opportunity for interpretive work to hear something rather than the thing. Liberating interpretive work from the need to uncover a single and hidden secret also offers hope for the unpredictable ways university courses shape lives and communities. The interpretive work demanded by a university course invites students and instructors to prioritize the human meaning of our labors and interactions. Just pedagogy teaches us to welcome interpretation’s messiness as an opportunity for spontaneous connections and unpredictable familiarity. A just pedagogy cannot ensure perfection in answers, but a just pedagogy empowers students to go forth from classes with courage to ask productive questions. This sort of just pedagogy need not be restricted to the academy. Time spent reading and talking together readies us for collaborating to welcome the perpetually unknown and ever stranger future. A just pedagogy trains us how to make every unexpected, new distance productive rather than alienating. Just pedagogy teaches us to ask relevant questions and reminds everyone to ask about the human meaning of our interpretive work.

NOTES 1. Primarily, this essay engages Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 1976) and explores the meaning of justice as it moves between the legal and the good. 2. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 92.

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3. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 75. 4. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 92. 5. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, xi, emphasis original. 6. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 33. 7. The description of discourse as work on analogy to other kinds of human working appears with greater clarity in Ricoeur’s essay “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John. B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 131–144. Work objectifies products distanced from the worker just as the artwork is distanced from the artist. “Thus interpretation is the reply to the fundamental distanciation constituted by the objectification of man in works of discourse, an objectificiation comparable to that expressed in the products of his labour and his art” (138). 8. His theory is thoroughly indebted Ferdinand de Sassure’s distinction in linguistics between langue and parole. Cf. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 2ff. By starting with linguistic theories, Ricoeur’s preferred examples circulate around literature and literary theory. Once transposed into the key of university pedagogy, that initial emphasis on literary theory may tempt a reader to pigeonhole Ricoeur’s interpretation theory to text-based content. What matters is that works of discourse enact an event of language that might be understood by an interpreter. The same hermeneutic model applies to the reading of a musical score or the reading of a painting as it does to the reading of a poem. 9. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 9. 10. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 9. 11. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 12, emphasis original. 12. The “dialectic of distanciation and appropriation . . . has an existential overtone. Distaciation means above all estrangement, and appropriation was intended as the ‘remedy’ which could ‘rescue’ cultural heritages of the past from the alienation of distance” (Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 89). My own shift to talking about estrangement in terms of affect anticipates comments in a later section on how questions derived from Ricoeur’s hermeneutics can combat the feelings of anxiety about interpreting faced by students. The notion of estrangement sits at the heart of Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation as it builds on and critiques the “hermeneutics of tradition.” In another essay, Ricoeur follows Gadamer and holds that “alienation is much more than a feeling or a mood; it is the ontological presupposition which sustains the objective conduct of the human sciences.” See Paul Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 60. 13. While Interpretation Theory develops Ricoeur’s more general hermeneutics, other writings emphasize the “regions” of special hermeneutics. I find this emphasis on general hermeneutics instructive for a just pedagogy insofar as interpretive work plays a role in any university course, regardless of disciplinary content or delivery style (e.g., lecture, seminar, asynchronous online, service learning, tutorial). 14. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 71–72. 15. James Henry Harris puts Ricoeur’s Interpretation Theory into the context of preaching for a particular community: “Getting in front of the text is to understand the text in a way that creates proximity between the text and the people.” James Henry

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Harris, Beyond the Tyranny of the Text: Preaching in Front of the Bible to Create a New World (Nashville: Abingdon, 2019), 15. On Harris’s social location as a Black preacher, see 24–26. 16. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 94. 17. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 47. 18. Empirical studies have found similarity in the speed at which literal and figurative interpretations occur. See Brian McElree and Johanna Nordlie, “Literal and Figurative Interpretations Are Computed in Equal Time,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 6, no. 3 (1999): 486–494. https://doi​.org​/10​.3758​/bf03210839. 19. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 55. 20. Importantly, Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor does not imply a radical distinction between literal and figurative meaning. The two work side-by-side; “for the one who participates in the symbolic signification there are really not two significations, one literal and the other symbolic, but rather a single movement, which transfers him from one level to the other and which assimilates him to the second signification by means of, or through, the literal one” (Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 55). 21. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 94. He concludes the book saying, “In this self-understanding, I would oppose the self, which proceeds from the understanding of the text, to the ego, which claims to precede it. It is the text, with its universal power of world disclosure, which gives a self to the ego” (Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 94–95). 22. Ricoeur’s focus on writing leads to discussions of various approaches to literary criticism (particularly structuralism in the analysis of myths); see Interpretation Theory, 80–88. 23. Ricoeur treats the theme of justice in many places across his later work, most notably in The Just, trans. David Pellaeur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). My comments in this essay follow Ricoeur’s shorter piece, “Le Juste entre le Légal et le Bon,” Espirit 174, no. 9 (Sept. 1991): 5–21. For that essay’s discussions of distributive justice, see 8. 24. Christopher Watkin summarizes Ricoeur’s approach well: “In ‘Le Juste entre le Légal et le Bon,’ the just is located in a similar tension between a Kantian deontological conformity to law and an Aristotelian teleological ethics of the ‘good life’. Justice is that which looks both ways [cf. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 228]. In a dialectic of (sanctionable) legality and (moral) goodness, or of power and legitimacy, justice is situated between private vengeance and public impotence [cf. Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 117].” See his Phenomenology or Deconstruction? The Question of Ontology in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean-Luc Nancy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 108. 25. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 79. 26. This is not meant to imply injustice in the critique of ideology displayed in discourse. The “legal” pole of just pedagogy stops ideology critique from becoming an ad hominem attack. Just pedagogy must always identify and correct logics of oppression when they appear in class discourse, both in course materials and in

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class discussion. But “calling out” the violence of a speech-act should never be misconstrued as an opportunity to deconstruct a class participant’s worldview by means of that speech-act. Just pedagogy asserts that an oppressive or offensive comment can never be considered proof of an oppressive or offensive personal commitment; the “comment” as work remains autonomous from its author. At the same time, just pedagogy avoids framing participants as “representatives” of the paradigm or perspective they may happen to hold as if a given worldview necessitates some mode of interpretation. 27. While an auditor or “non-traditional” student might choose to take a university course as an experience of “continuing education,” university courses sit within the context of a larger program and a wider community. A skills-based class, by contrast, does not intend the same sort of opportunities for self-reflection and personal formation as they appear throughout the suite of courses that make up a college program. 28. Indeed, Ricoeur acknowledges his similarity to Gadamer. In the sense of “the process of distanciation, of atemporalization . . . connected to the phase of erklärung, is the fundamental presupposition for this enlarging of the horizon of the text. In this sense, appropriation as nothing to do with any kind of person to person appeal. It is instead close to what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls a fusion of horizons (Horizonsverschmelzung): the world horizon of the reader is fused with the world horizon of the writer. And the ideality of the text is the mediating link in this process of horizon fusing” (Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 93). 29. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 44. 30. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 37. 31. For Ricoeur, interpretive work presumes an “objectivity of meaning in oral discourse” that might be freed from its “historical process” for the sake of an “indefinite widening of the sphere of communication.” He writes, “The text—objectified and dehistoricized—becomes the necessary mediation between writer and reader” (Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 91). As such, interpretation can find meanings in excess of a reconstruction of the intentions of the author or the text’s compositional history and original audience (92). “The process of distanciation, of atemporalization . . . is the fundamental presupposition for this enlarging of the horizon of the text” (93). 32. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 30. 33. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 92. 34. As Ricoeur says, “It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our immediate reach” (Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 79). 35. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 93. 36. Assignments meant to encourage or reward the “gift” of preparatory work should obviously augment the collaborative work of the class session. Quizzes, online posts, journals, annotation assignments, or discussion questions become busywork (tests of recall or summarizing) when not subjected to re-query during class. 37. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 95.

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38. If working with the text, I hand out copies of the fourth essay, sometimes only pages 71–79. The exercise can be expanded to include addition reflection on answers keyed to Ricoeur’s discussion of guess and validation. 39. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 351, emphasis original.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Harris, James Henry. Beyond the Tyranny of the Text: Preaching in Front of the Bible to Create a New World. Nashville: Abingdon, 2019. McElree, Brian, and Johanna Nordlie. “Literal and Figurative Interpretations are Computed in Equal Time.” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 6, no. 3 (1999): 486–494. https://doi​.org​/10​.3758​/bf03210839. Ricoeur, Paul. Critique and Conviction. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. ———. “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation.” In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Edited by John. B. Thompson, 131–144. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Edited by John. B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: TCU Press, 1976. ———. The Just. Translated by David Pellaeur. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. “Le Juste entre le Légal et le Bon.” Espirit 174, no. 9 (Sept. 1991): 5–21. ———. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ———. The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon, 1967. ———. “The Task of Hermeneutics.” In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Edited by John B. Thompson, 43–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Watkin, Christopher. Phenomenology or Deconstruction? The Question of Ontology in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Chapter 3

Practical Formation Teaching Critical Thinking via Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Model Laura Schmidt Roberts

In a climate where postsecondary education is increasingly pursued with a focus on recognizably vocational training for gainful employment, the liberal arts in general and the humanities in particular find themselves beset by the challenge of justifying their continuation. How does one articulate the essential contribution of the humanities to the task and mission of the modern university in this context? This essay contends that the teaching and development of critical thinking as criticality—a composite of thinking, being, and acting—is central to the mission of educating persons for meaningful life and work in the present and the future. Employing Ricoeur’s hermeneutical model as a frame for teaching criticality is particularly helpful for this task in two ways. First, it entails the ongoing critical formation of the self. Second, it culminates in appropriation, which demonstrates the broad practical applicability of criticality. Ricoeur’s text-based focus provides a challenging yet circumscribed arena in which criticality can be developed and practiced, even while his approach may be transferred to “texts” more broadly construed. I begin by contemplating a teaching experience in which my students’ pragmatic questions of relevance and practical application reshaped the nature of critical engagement in a course on the history of biblical interpretation. After a brief description of critical thinking as criticality, I explore Ricoeur’s hermeneutical model as a framework for teaching criticality, through consideration of the productivity of distanciation and the understanding-explanation dialectic, including appropriation as the culmination of the interpretive process. Each section demonstrates the aspects of criticality developed by that part of Ricoeur’s model, concluding the usefulness of such 57

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a hermeneutically informed pedagogy for scaffolding an iterative, potentially life-long process of formation. 1. REFLECTION Several years ago, the question of the importance and relevance of the humanities in higher education was brought to a fine point in a history of biblical interpretation course I teach at Fresno Pacific University. Some of my students, most all evangelical Protestants in nondenominational churches, voiced skepticism that much could be learned from hermeneutical methods and biblical interpretations so distant from current historical-critical approaches and contemporary issues. They questioned how this would grow their Christian faith, but even more how it would help them in their work in the church and community. Their commitment to the authority of scripture for Christian faith and practice led them to assume the relevance and practical application of biblical texts in their everyday lives and the life of their communities of faith. But that same commitment mostly produced the opposite posture toward historical interpretations they viewed as significantly divergent from their own. As “tradition,” the historical interpretations were suspect, more likely an encumbrance to the understanding and appropriation of biblical texts than illuminating of them. I was, frankly, troubled by their disinterest. How could I facilitate their encounter with the historical interpretations as not mere artifacts but an opportunity for critical reflection and personal formation? This experience clarified how the critical formation of the self shapes what the self views as relevant and pragmatic. As a class we moved through a series of exercises and discussions that facilitated our hearing those texts as voices with something to say, something worth careful consideration for the way in which they often challenged and sometimes illuminated our own understandings of the shared sacred texts. The historical texts became relevant and practical, sometimes in their content but always in their illuminating our own interpretive practices, occasioning critical reflection and formation. The humanities are central to the formation of self-reflective critical persons whose judgment of the relevant and pragmatic is broader and deeper, marked by consideration of the long and steady work that justice and flourishing require. 2. CRITICALITY: THINKING, BEING, ACTING The lengthy and robust arguments surrounding definitions of critical thinking in higher education point to the challenge and importance of both its teaching

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and reception. Some definitions restrict the term to cognitive skills in argumentation and analysis, while others combine these with the development of reflective judgment or dispositions or both.1 For the purposes of this paper, critical thinking as criticality—a composite of thinking, being, and acting— provides the working definition.2 This view has the advantage of attempting to hold together an array of approaches in dialectic tension, an approach resonant with Ricoeur’s persistent desire to mediate apparently contradictory methodological commitments. Criticality in higher education has at least six distinct, yet integrated and permeable dimensions: (1) core skills in critical argumentation (reasoning and inference making), (2) critical judgments, (3) critical-thinking dispositions and attitudes, (4) critical being and critical actions, (5) societal and ideology critique, and (6) critical creativity or critical openness.3

The combined dimensions attend to both individual and sociocultural “vectors that account for very different, equally important, aspects of critical thinking.”4 As skills and dispositions, criticality focuses on the development of the individual, working within and making reasoned, critical judgments from within disciplinary frameworks, for example. The sociocultural dimension asserts the moral and cultural characteristics of criticality, attending to “the development of the student as a person” through focus on “attitudes, emotions, intuitions, human being, creativity, and so on.”5 Here education for social change and critical democratic citizenship are developed through critique of inequities, power relationships, and ideologies, with the goal of societal transformation. Davies and Barnett note a significant difference between the individual and sociocultural vectors’ definition of “critical.” Taken to mean “criticism,” criticality is about skills in assessing the validity and reliability of arguments—the individual vector. But the sociocultural vector takes “criticism” to mean “critique,” and sets about forming critical consciousness culminating in critical action by questioning the power relationships structuring society, attending to the social and political functioning of arguments and reasoning and their wider frames of thought, and identifying dimensions of meaning missed or concealed behind claims and frameworks. Criticality entails “students reflecting on their knowledge and simultaneously developing powers of critical thinking, critical self-reflection, and critical action—and thereby developing (as a result) critical being.”6 This composite understanding—developing critical being through thought, self-reflection and action—already begins to address the purpose and practicality of criticality as central to the mission of educating (shaping, developing, and training) persons for meaningful life and work in the present and the

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future. Though not unique to the humanities, the development of criticality or critical thinking more narrowly defined has been and continues to be a primary objective of these areas of study. As Davies and Barnett explain, criticality presents “a sense of ‘critical thinking’ that extends beyond the individual and his or her cognitive states and dispositions to the individual’s participation in society as a critically engaged citizen in the world.”7 This model’s practical contribution lies in its focus on the development of critical being, marked by both individual and sociocultural dimensions which attend to the ongoing development of the student as a self-reflective person exercising their own agency in ways that are meaningful and purposeful for themselves and society.8 3. DISTANCIATION AND CRITICALITY But how does education develop such a person? What follows considers the contribution Ricoeur’s hermeneutical model makes toward structuring aspects of the development of criticality resulting in critical being. The notion of distanciation proves central to Ricoeur’s conceptualization of interpretation as the movement from understanding to explanation and then from explanation to understanding at a new level culminating in appropriation. I explore each of these in turn, highlighting the aspects of criticality emphasized and developed by each. Textual interpretation provides the paradigm for human encounter with historical traditions for Ricoeur because communication in and through distance is characteristic of human historicity. The fact of human historicity—not only our locatedness as individuals in time, space, and historical traditions (and the myriad ways in which these shape our understanding and experience), but also the locatedness of sociocultural ideas, expressions and institutions—must be acknowledged and attended to in the development of criticality. As will be shown below, such a critical historical consciousness both makes possible and is further developed by self-critical reflection, critical dispositions (inquisitiveness, intellectual humility and courage, openmindedness and respect for alternative viewpoints), and critical cognitive skills (identifying assumptions, analyzing and synthesizing claims, evaluating arguments and making reasoned judgments).9 Distanciation and Historical Consciousness A dialectic of participatory belonging and alienating distanciation is Ricoeur’s response to the inescapable historicity of the transmission and reception of cultural heritages which occurs through interpretations of the

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“signs” of tradition.10 Distanciation constitutes a condition of such interpretation because it makes one aware of belonging to a tradition in a historically conscious way. That is, it makes evident that texts and their interpreters are located within and shaped by traditions, and that while real temporal distance separates the traditioned text and interpreter, that distance is also generative of meaning. Ricoeur’s exploration of the hermeneutical function of distanciation develops the problematic of the text “in view of that to which it testifies, the positive and productive function of distanciation at the heart of the historicity of human experience.”11 He insists that while distanciation makes possible a measure of objectivity in the human sciences, we also participate in and belong to the historical reality we claim to construct as object. This distanciation results in the text achieving semantic autonomy by which distance from the original author, context, and audience makes possible a new event of meaning in the interpreter’s encounter with the text. The text’s semantic autonomy is expansive—it expands readers to a potentially universal audience, expands the reference of the text to the world it projects, expands the interpretive act to explication of “the type of being-in-the-world unfolded in front of the text” by the reader.12 This expansion is possible because a dialectic of event and meaning characterizes the text as discourse, accounting for both the momentary nature of discourse as always realized temporally in the present (something said to someone about something) and the possible reidentification of the event of discourse as having the same meaning.13 “Writing is the full manifestation of discourse” because with the semantic autonomy of the text meaning surpasses event most completely. The written text constitutes a completed event—a boundaried whole with structure, content, and meaning. In the most fundamental form of distanciation, the transition from the saying to the said, writing inscribes the meaning of the event rather than the event itself. For Ricoeur, “distanciation is not the product of methodology and hence something superfluous and parasitical; rather it is constitutive of the phenomenon of the text as writing. At the same time, it is the condition of interpretation.”14 Distanciation allows for a critical examination of the interpreter’s assumptions as well as the text’s structure, content, and production.15 The “appropriation” culminating the interpretive act thus forms the counterpart of semantic autonomy. Ricoeur describes reading as “the ‘remedy’ by which the meaning of the text is ‘rescued’ from the estrangement of distanciation and put in a new proximity.”16 We can “make our own” the meaning of texts that lie at a distance from us because the semantic autonomy of the text frees it from the limits of the original author, audience, and setting so that it may speak across the temporal distance. Yet an interpretation that does not retain awareness of the difference between the interpreter’s horizon and that

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projected by the world of the text achieves not a “fusion” of the two but their confusion.17 In fact, Ricoeur argues, without this distanciation “we would never become conscious of belonging to a world, a culture, a tradition.”18 The hermeneutical reflection corresponding to distanciation “is the critical moment, originally bound to the consciousness of belonging-to, that confers its properly historical character on this consciousness.”19 Such consciousness includes recognition of the interpreter’s being shaped by the past and by the present context; it demands self-reflective acknowledgment of the already situated nature of any engagement. The same may be said of the text: as a work it is shaped by traditions of genre and style, and its ongoing significance is born of the history of its reception.20 Distanciation and Teaching Criticality The dialectic of participatory belonging and alienating distanciation characterizing our encounter with written texts develops essential aspects of criticality due to the way it scaffolds development of a self-reflective historical consciousness. Distanciation makes possible interpretation by which we as readers might reactualize the text as discourse referring to a world, receiving its disclosure and coming to a new understanding of ourselves as well. For Ricoeur, this requires attention to the locatedness and uniqueness of the text as shaped by historical conventions, traditions, and reception—work entailing criticality skills such as analyzing and synthesizing claims, evaluating arguments, and forming judgments. It also requires attention to our situated engagement as interpreters, an awareness of the frameworks, and assumptions shaping the horizon of view from which we encounter the text. Historically, conscious interpretation moves from an initial grasp of the whole through explanatory procedures which in part make us more aware of the frameworks we bring to the initial reading. Such awareness both requires and further develops criticality dispositions in relation to the self (intellectual humility and courage, tolerance of ambiguity, integrity, perseverance), in relation to the other (respect for alternative viewpoints, open- and fair-mindedness, skepticism), and in relation to the world (interest, inquisitiveness, seeing both sides of an issue).21 Criticality understands the development of such dispositions and historical consciousness as an important element of higher education, challenging though it may be. In my own experience, this complex formation is well-served by sequenced assignments that prompt students to analyze their own social location and how it shapes their view through engagement with the views of others differently located. For example, in a class on the gospel of Matthew I have students complete a social location inventory and then write about and discuss how

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that shapes their view of Jesus. Other assignments have them ask those same questions of different character groups in Matthew and in an interview with a person close to them. Repeated practice at thinking about social location and connecting it to a specific viewpoint develops their historical consciousness and critical dispositions in relation to self and other. I support this development in class sessions by drawing these considerations forward as we discuss the text and context of Matthew. Another assignment addresses the locatedness and uniqueness of the text itself more directly through a series of interpretation exercises guiding students’ critical literary analysis of a brief passage followed by a brief review of scholarship in the form of annotated bibliography of several commentaries on their passage. The latter provides encounter with the expert voices of several “others” to which students respond in a final paper identifying where and how their initial understanding of the passage has changed as a result of the literary analysis and annotated bibliography. The assignments, classroom discussion of them, and the in-class modeling of literary and historical analysis using diverse expert viewpoints supports the development of historically conscious interpretation marked by criticality dispositions in relation to self and other.22 While this process of formation is ongoing, the teaching-learning environment provides an arena in which to make explicit the importance of recognizing how historicity shapes texts and engagement with them. Identifying the disciplinary parameters within which good thinking, reading, interpreting, and understanding will take place forms part of that task. Important too is clarifying that critical engagement with the texts includes self-critical reflection on how locatedness shapes reading, and the assumption that the text has something to say. All of this requires the critical dispositions noted above, which are formed through practicing them in the learning community. Selfreflective historical consciousness so developed gathers the skills, reflective judgment, and dispositions together in formation of an orientation—a person’s way of being in the world (critical being). 4. THE UNDERSTANDING-EXPLANATION DIALECTIC AND CRITICALITY Ricoeur’s reconfiguration of the relation between understanding and explanation as one of complementarity and reciprocity is linked to his notion of interpretation or reading as its own dialectical paradigm. The process of interpretation consists of the dialectical encounter of understanding and explanation in the act of reading, which he discusses as the movement from understanding to explanation and from explanation to understanding at a new

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level. The movement from understanding to explanation scaffolds the development and exercise of the multiple levels of cognitive skills and reflective judgment which criticality identifies, as well as dispositions toward self and other necessary for putting those skills to use. By way of example, in the biblical text analysis project above, after a first read of a text students move from their initial understanding to “explanation” in the form of their own literary analysis of the passage and the analysis and conclusions of scholarly commentaries, developing skills in analyzing claims and evaluating arguments as well as dispositions of perseverance, respect for alternative viewpoints, and open-mindedness. The final paper in this sequence structures the movement from explanation to understanding at a new level culminating in appropriation by asking students to discuss how their interpretation changed as a result of the “explanatory” work, requiring criticality dispositions of intellectual courage and humility in addition to openness. The explanation-understanding movement emphasizes a selfcritical reflection including dispossession of the ego that opens to reader to receiving an “enlarged self” from the way of being-in-the-world disclosed by the world of the text. Interpretation culminates in appropriation of this way of being, and as such moves toward critical action and the broader development of critical being that marks criticality’s goal. From Understanding to Explanation In the movement from understanding to explanation, a dialectic of understanding as guessing and explanation as validation emerges. As discourse, the text presents a totality that must be taken as a whole. Its unique configuration furnishes an individuality, but this stylization occurs within the confines of broader structures which govern production in a given genre and make recourse to structural analysis appropriate. Hermeneutics is the art of discerning the discourse in the work as given in and through the structures of the work itself. Thus, for Ricoeur, the detour through explanation is the path of understanding for the nature of written discourse as a structured work both requires and makes possible this mediation of understanding by explanation.23 In the movement from understanding to explanation an initial “guess” at the meaning of a text (necessitated by its semantic autonomy) includes construing the text as a whole, as an individual, and as a product of style.24 Understanding the meaning of the text as a whole requires a judgment of importance regarding the relation between the parts and the whole.25 As works of discourse, texts have a plurivocity as a whole, different from the polysemy of words or the ambiguity of sentences, which opens the possibility of multiple constructions and thus the need for judgment. Understanding the meaning of the text as an individual involves a sense for the relation of

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surface meaning to the depth structure, narrowing the scope of generic concepts present to reach the unique work of discourse. Finally, understanding the meaning of a text as a product of style entails determining which “potential horizons of meaning” are actualized through the style of the text. Ricoeur observes the perspectival aspect of the reconstruction of the text as a singular whole, noting that this “onesideness” of reading grounds the guess character of interpretation.26 Yet Ricoeur clarifies: “if it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal. The text presents a limited field of possible constructions.”27 As a result, explanation functions as a process of validation following a logic of probability as opposed to empirical verification. Validation functions as an “argumentative discipline,” governing competing and often conflicting interpretations which must demonstrate the degree of their probability and adequacy as construals of the whole text in light of its structures. In the biblical text analysis project, students judge between competing expert construals—the commentaries— revising their own understanding in light of those they find most convincing (enter criticality’s analytical/evaluative skills and reflective judgment). Ricoeur views this as an ongoing process of confrontation, arbitration, and even seeking agreement, though the latter may well remain beyond immediate reach. In the act of reading, interpretation engages the dialectic of understanding as guesswork and explanation as validation, which Ricoeur identifies as “roughly the counterpart” of the event-meaning dialectic.28 Understanding-Explanation and Teaching Criticality In defining criticality, Davies and Barnett adopt a taxonomy which distinguishes lower, higher, and complex levels of cognitive skills.29 This initial phase of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach scaffolds the exercise of all three levels. Lower-level skills of initial interpretation and identification of assumptions are clearly needed for Ricoeur’s “initial guess” at the meaning of a text as a whole, and individual, and a product of style. Higher-skill levels analyzing and synthesizing claims become increasingly important as the reader detours through the explanatory procedures of structural analysis. Discerning the discourse of the work in and through the structures of the work requires these and the more complex skills exercised in evaluating arguments regarding possible construals of the relationship between the parts and whole. The cognitive skills aspect of criticality emphasizes these skills and the way in which judgment formation is pervasive in their use.30 I asked students in my history of biblical interpretation class, for example, to read a brief passage of scripture and do a quick-write of their initial interpretation of its meaning (their “initial guess”). The second step asked them

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to reflect on the interpretive approaches they used and to identify aspects of the text needing further explanation or research (framing out the explanatory procedures). In an exegetical paper or longer in-class writing assignment, they would have moved more fully into the process of explanation, argumentation, and judgment regarding the best construal of the text. But even this limited exercise surfaced multiple understandings, varied approaches, and different views on what required further explanation or research to make a better-informed interpretation (different construals of the relation between part and whole). Yet these skills in analysis, argumentation, and judgment formation cannot be developed or exercised without the disposition to use them, and so criticality emphasizes the importance of dispositions as well. As affective states, dispositions reflect “a constellation of attitudes, intellectual virtues, and habits of mind . . . arising in relation to the self, in relation to others, and in relation to the world.”31 This initial movement in Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach assumes such dispositions arising in relation to the self, the other, and the world (a desire to be well-informed, intellectual courage and humility, open-mindedness, skepticism, inquisitiveness). The written text requires reader initiative—the unread text remains unengaged. The interpreter must demonstrate sufficient interest to generate an initial, reasoned reading of the text as a whole, then persevering to the “detour through explanation” which adjudicates among competing possible interpretations for their adequacy as construals of the whole text in light of its structures. In the history of biblical interpretation class my students readily exhibited that kind of interest and perseverance in their engagement with biblical texts but much less so with interpretations of biblical texts by historical Christian figures. Course assignments motivate a kind of interest, at least, and so a third step immediately followed the “initial guess” and identification of things needing research or explanation in the quick-write assignment on a biblical text described above. Students read an interpretation of the same brief biblical text by a historical figure, summarized the meaning of the passage according the figure’s view, and noted their approach including aspects the figure treated with extended explanation or emphasized as central to the overall meaning. Then we talked about similarities and differences. This assignment was repeated numerous times throughout the semester, and student interest in the historical interpretations grew (inquisitiveness, open-mindedness) along with their skills in analysis, argumentation, and judgment formation. The skill and integrity with which such dispositions are exhibited is also a matter of continual formation. Ricoeur’s model assumes an ongoing hermeneutical spiral by which initial, even fledgling dispositions may become more robust, manifest in more integrated practices. Davies and Barnett observe that, while crucial, skills and dispositions remain insufficient if

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unaccompanied by action, for these combined develop critical being—the critical person.32 Critical self-reflection and critical action are more evident in the explanation-understanding-appropriation counterpart than in this first movement from understanding to explanation. Yet the criticality dispositions in relation to self, other, and world present here point to measures of selfreflection and formation of critical being (the critical person), for example, in the inquisitiveness initiating engagement with the text and the first “guess” at meaning and in the intellectual courage and open-mindedness to test that understanding through explanation and validation. From Explanation to Understanding Culminating in Appropriation The second part of the understanding-explanation dialectic constituting interpretation is the movement from explanation to understanding at a new level. For Ricoeur, explanatory analysis of the text as a structured whole does not accomplish full textual interpretation, for its reading of the text retains “suspense of its meaning for us and the postponement of all actualization through contemporary discourse.”33 In maintaining suspended reference, structural analysis provides explanation but does not yet interpret the text, for interpretation requires the second kind of reading which lifts the suspension of the text’s meaning for the reader, reactualizing it as discourse referring to a world. The function of explanatory procedures is to lead from the first reading to the second, to mediate between phases of understanding, for “to understand a text is to follow its movement from sense to reference: from what it says to what it talks about.” The sense of the text presents “a new way of looking at things,” “an injunction to think in a certain manner.” The sense is thus disclosed in front of the text in the nonostensive reference displayed as the world opened up by the text.34 Ricoeur considers the world of the text “the center of gravity of the hermeneutical question,” its “decisive problematic.” His focus on the text functions, in a sense, as so much preparation for addressing the world that the text opens up. For, as Ricoeur explains, “what we understand first in discourse is not another person, but a project, that is, the outline of a new being-in-the-world.”35 Only writing reveals this “destination of discourse as projecting a world,” by obtaining semantic autonomy. Ricoeur employs Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons” to explain the way in which the interpreter encounters the mode of being-in-the-world disclosed by the text an encounter born of the recognized difference and uniqueness of both text’s and interpreter’s “horizon.” As a result, “to interpret is to explicate the type of being-in-the-world unfolded in front of the text,” a proposed world “wherein I could project my ownmost possibilities.” For Ricoeur, “the text

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is the medium through which we understand ourselves.” Thus appropriation forms the counterpart of disclosure, as the reshaped hermeneutical circle shifts to an “ontological plane,” formed between the horizon of interpreter and text, between the interpreter’s mode of being and the mode disclosed by the world of the text.36 Criticality proves central to this process, for it develops skills and dispositions by which distance between interpreter and text may be examined and made productive (analysis, reflective judgment, respect for alternate viewpoints, self-critical awareness, humility, and openness). Appropriation also forms a dialectic with the structural objectification characteristic of the text as a work, by responding to the sense of the text. Ricoeur clarifies: “in contrast to the tradition of the cogito and to the pretension of the subject to know itself by immediate intuition, it must be said that we understand ourselves only by the long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works.”37 The text mediates self-understanding through the encounter with the world of the text, for “ultimately, what I appropriate is a proposed world.” Just as this world unfolds in front of the text, so “to understand is to understand oneself in front of the text. It is not a question of imposing upon the text our finite capacity for understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarged self, which would be the proposed existence corresponding in the most suitable way to the world proposed.” Thus, as appropriation, interpretation culminates in self-interpretation by which one begins to understand oneself or understands oneself better or differently. The reader “is invited to undergo an imaginative variation of his ego,” just as the world of the work presents an imaginative variation on reality as “a future horizon of undecided possibilities.”38 Such “imaginative variations” became possible for students in my history of biblical interpretation class, for example, because many shifted beyond mere increased interest to a disposition assuming those texts had something to say to them worth considering. They opened themselves to disclosure and in so doing found their understanding of biblical texts and of themselves as interpreters changed. Here one sees criticality’s emphasis on developing the whole person, formation of critical being through thought and self-reflection shaping disposition and action: appropriation. This appropriation entails not possession of the text but dispossession of the ego, including the deconstruction of the illusions of the subject, and so a hermeneutics of suspicion joins a hermeneutics of retrieval in the understanding-explanation dialectic. The interpreter must take the “detour” through the explanatory procedures addressing both the structured text and the location and illusions of the interpreting subject. Only in this way can understanding as self-understanding in front of the text be formed by the world of the text instead of deformed by the false-consciousness and unexamined prejudices of the interpreter.39 This relates to the discussion of historicity and the situated

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nature of any engagement but includes a more intentional consideration of elements of power, interest, and ideology in the interpreter’s location, the way in which these shape one’s interpretation, and a genuine openness to receiving an expanded self-understanding from the disclosure of the text. Criticality’s composite endeavor forms the self-understanding, making such critical consciousness, humility, and openness possible. Analytical skills and reflective judgment brought to bear on the self (assumptions, prejudices, privilege, and worldview) develop dispositions which shape actions, culminating in the ongoing formation of critical being. The teaching-learning environment provides an arena in which to cultivate and practice such critical consciousness, for example, through the use of social location inventories as preparation for guided encounter with texts differently situated or that explicitly ask whose interest is served by a given textual interpretation. Yet the paired hermeneutics of retrieval and suspicion must be directed toward the text as well, as texts provide the paradigmatic encounter with historical traditions for Ricoeur. The explanatory procedures through which one explores the traditioned text as a structured whole must include the “detour” through the critique of illusions and ideology operational in and through the traditioned text. In fact, as David Tracy observes, “we [must] admit that everything—ourselves, our texts, and the conversation itself—is deeply affected by the ambiguity and plurality that touch all. Retrieval now demands both critique and suspicion.”40 I began this chapter by reflecting on student suspicion of historical interpretations of biblical texts; my desire was, really, to move them toward a hermeneutics of retrieval. As student understanding of the context and concerns shaping the historical interpretations grew, so did their ability to critically examine the contribution and limitation (the ambiguity) of those views. Their impulse to ask parallel questions of contemporary interpretations (including their own) and the biblical texts themselves also grew. Whose interest is served, how power/powerlessness maps onto the world of biblical text and interpreter, which voices are absent—these kinds of questions reflecting retrieval accompanied by critical consciousness (in relation to self and texts) became a regular part of class discussion and written assignments. Understanding-Explanation-Appropriation and Teaching Criticality Criticality expands beyond cognitive skills of argumentation and reflective judgment to the wider identity and participation of persons in the world through “simultaneously developing powers of critical thinking, critical selfreflection and critical action—and thereby developing (as a result) critical being.” Davies and Barnet describe this expansion as pointing to “the way a

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person is in the world,” and orienting participation and action in the world. This composite of thinking, being-in-the-world, and action means criticality can “prompt students to understand themselves, to have a critical orientation to the world, and to demonstrate an active sociopolitical stance toward established norms or practices with which they are confronted.”41 Ricoeur’s hermeneutical model scaffolds this development in his exploration of reading as its own paradigm in which explanation mediates between phases of understanding and finds its completion in understanding culminating in appropriation. The movement from explanation to understanding builds on the critical cognitive skills and dispositions toward self, other, and world seen in the first part of the dialectic. The second part of the understanding-explanation dialectic moves beyond explanatory analysis to actual interpretation. Willingness to follow the sense of the text from what it says to what it talks about—to hear the text as “an injunction to think in a certain manner” and “a new way of looking at things” entails inquisitiveness and openness but also self-reflection. Reception of this disclosure requires dispossession of the ego—a selfcritical hermeneutic attending to elements of power, interest, and ideology shaping the interpreter’s location and interpretation. Attempts at actualization which remain uninformed by analysis and historical consciousness produce not a fusion but a confusion of horizons. The disclosure of the text requires critical cognitive skills and varied dispositions to bring the text to speech with integrity as discourse—as something said to someone about something. But remaining in explanation insulates the reader from the challenge the world and way of being-in-the-world the text might present to them. In moving to interpretation, the reader reactualizes the text as discourse referring to a world and a way of being in the world which unfolds in front of the text along with the reader’s self-understanding. One final example to bring this last section of theory to ground. Students in my Intro to Theology course are asked to analyze Justo González’s critique of “traditional” attributes of God (omnipotent, omnipresent, infinite), tracing and critically assessing his argument.42 For some, their initial reaction is offense and they struggle to restate the argument as formulated. They cannot believe he rejects these traditioned descriptions of God’s attributes (he identifies this god as an idol, concluding these attributes do not reflect the way God’s power and presence are narrated in scripture). They resist his probing, for example, the ways the ruling class benefits from a God whose hallmark is an unlimited power that should not be resisted. But in class, after processing their initial reactions and objections, as we map the actual argument and look at the biblical texts, comprehension (if not always agreement) builds. What makes this possible, beyond the need to think more clearly and do to better analysis, is getting to the root of their objections—objections born of the

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collision of their world and that disclosed by González’s text. My students struggle to make sense of his argument and the biblical hermeneutic driving it (that the Bible is fundamentally concerned with issues of power and powerlessness) because of the challenge it presents to fundamental aspects of their world and way of being: who is God, how do I best understand and put into practice my sacred texts, can I trust the authoritative interpretations of teachers in my faith community. This example demonstrates multiple challenges to developing criticality by guiding students from their initial understanding through explanatory analysis to an understanding culminating in genuine, potentially transformative encounter between the text’s disclosure and their own interpretive world. The hermeneutical model proves particularly helpful for the way it attends to the interpreter as a self in the potential fusion and often collision of world of text and reader. The exercise and development of cognitive skills (analysis, inference, and argumentation) is inseparable from dispositions by which one encounters the world and frameworks through which one understands and navigates being-in-the-world. A hermeneutically informed pedagogy helps build in structured attention to this complexity, scaffolding an iterative process of formation. Unpacking student reaction to González’s argument together meant getting at the reasons for it; dispositions and orientation in the world were the heart of it. Our collective initial understandings (including mine as teacher) became the shared ground from which we again pursued explanatory analysis, working to hear and consider the text’s challenge as self-reflective interpreters. Over the course of the semester, repeated encounters with the work of González and other challenging “others” kept the learning community’s formational spiral going. The most visible actions emerging were shifts in interpretive practices, though the implications for some also meant different concrete practices in their community of faith (asking critical questions about the Bible, its interpretation and appropriation; talking about and teaching the Bible and its lived application differently). This somewhat lengthy description serves to demonstrate the complexity of teaching criticality as the development of critical being—the formation of persons and their way of being-in-the-world—and the benefits of a hermeneutically informed pedagogy for scaffolding such development. As the terminus of interpretation, appropriation means an expanded self and orientation in the world culminating in action. While the latter is least developed in the hermeneutical model discussed here, later work by Ricoeur makes this more explicit: For “it is beyond reading, in effective action, instructed by the works handed down, that the configuration of the text is transformed into refiguration.”43 Because a hermeneutics of suspicion is an essential part of Ricoeur’s model, the action stemming from appropriation of the disclosed way of being-in-the-world by the self-critical reader is critical action—critique of

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ideology and the illusions of the subject shape the reader as a critical person who critically engages the structured realities of their world in dispositions, speech and action born of critical orientation toward self, other and world.44 CONCLUSION Ricoeur’s hermeneutical model provides a framework for teaching criticality resulting in critical being due to its emphasis on the ongoing critical formation of the self in the interpretive process. A hermeneutics of suspicion proves central to the recurring hermeneutical spiral in which the disclosed way of being-in-the-world and self-understanding both unfold in front of the text. This image presents the continued self-reflective formation of a person oriented to critically and thoughtfully engage the world around them such that, in appropriation, action and reflection inform each other. Critical thinking, being, and acting form persons for meaningful life and work as critically engaged participants in society and world. The teaching-learning environment can structure encounters with the potential to develop a self-critical hermeneutic and historical consciousness opening the interpreter to the text’s disclosure and its transformative appropriation. In my own experience, this kind of work bears some fruit in the parameters of the course but, at least as often, comes to fuller fruition later—in other courses continuing such formation, in student reflections in their senior capstone, even in postgraduation employment or further studies. This should come as no surprise in a chapter arguing this formation occurs as a kind of ongoing hermeneutical spiral in which new understanding, disposition, and action become the ground from which the next layer of development grows. Such is the long and steady work the formation of critical being requires—the work of shaping a particular kind of life-long learner, one whose education orients the ever-unfolding development of their way of being-in-the-world. NOTES 1. In the introduction to The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education, editors Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett provide an excellent overview of the literature on critical thinking over the past several decades. See Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–25. 2. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 15. The authors identify three “rival perspectives” which inform their model: (1) the philosophical perspective focusing

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on clear and rigorous thinking, formal and informal logic, the relationship to language use in ordinary contexts, and metacognitive processing; (2) the educational perspective’s broader concern for developing individual students to benefit wider society through the formation of criticosocial attitude; (3) the socially active perspective committed to cultivating critical attitudes which move students to pursue transformation of society through critical action (Davies and Barnett, 6). See also Martin Davies, “A Model of Critical Thinking in Higher Education,” in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, ed. Michael B. Paulsen, vol. 30 (Switzerland: Springer International, 2015), 41–92. 3. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 8. The authors identify four categories of cognitive skills: Lower-level/foundation: interpreting, identifying assumptions, asking questions for clarification; Higher level: analyzing claims, synthesizing claims, predicting; Complex: evaluating arguments, reasoning verbally, inferencemaking, problem-solving; Thinking about thinking: Metacognition, self-regulation. They identify three categories of dispositions arising (1) in relation to Self: desire to be well-informed, willingness to seek/be guided by reason, tentativeness, tolerance of ambiguity, intellectual humility, intellectual courage, integrity, empathy, perseverance, and holding ethical standards; (2) in relation to Other: respect for alternative viewpoints, open-mindedness, fair-mindedness, appreciation of individual differences, and skepticism; (3) in relation to World: interest, inquisitiveness, seeing both sides of an issue; and a fourth category of other dispositions: mindfulness, critical spiritedness (Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 12–13). 4. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 9. 5. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 7, emphasis original. 6. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 9, 15, emphasis original. 7. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 16. 8. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 16. 9. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 12–13. 10. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 131. Ricoeur’s view of the philosophical task as mediation becomes obvious here, as he creates a dialectic between previously exclusionary alternatives. 11. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 131–132. 12. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 141–142. While a measure of distanciation characterizes speech, Ricoeur views distanciation as constitutive of the text as writing. My description of the text’s semantic autonomy reflects the four principal forms of distanciation he says characterize a written text as a completed whole: the fixation of meaning, the dissociation of meaning from authorial intent, the universal range of addresses, and the display of nonostensive references. See Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 210. 13. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 12, 90. 14. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 139–140. 15. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 131–144. See also 198–200 and Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 26–29.

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16. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 43. For one of many discussions on the dialectical relationship of participatory belonging and alienating distanciation, see Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 53–62. 17. Ricoeur employs Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons” to explain the way in which the interpreter encounters the mode of being-in-the-world disclosed by the text; see Hermeneutics, 177, 185. I address this further in the section on the movement from explanation to understanding. 18. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 107. 19. Ricoeur, 107. 20. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 139–140, 210; Ricoeur, Essays, 107. 21. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 13. 22. The assignments described are from a course developed together and taught by multiple faculty. I’m indebted to my colleagues Melanie Howard, Brian DiPalma, and Greg Camp for their biblical studies expertise and curricular creativity. 23. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 136–137. 24. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 76–78. 25. Ricoeur reformulates Friederich Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical circle as “a connection between two discourses: the discourse of the text and the discourse of the interpretation.” See Paul Ricoeur, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, eds. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart (Philadelphia: Beacon, 1978), 90; F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman (Atlanta: Scholars, 1977), 113, 202. 26. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 77–78; Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 211–212; David E. Klemm, The Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur: A Constructive Analysis (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1983), 93. 27. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 79. 28. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 78–79; Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 212–213. 29. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 12. Adopted from C. E. Wales and A. H. Nardi, The Paradox of Critical Thinking (Morgantown, WV: Center for Guided Design, 1984). 30. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 12. 31. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 13. 32. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 16. 33. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 84. 34. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 82–84, 87–88; Ricoeur, Hermeneutics 154–56, 217–218. Ricoeur illustrates this by considering a structuralist explanation of the sense of the Oedipus myth, which attempts to restrict attention to the internal dynamics of the myth’s interrelated text units, but in the end cannot avoid accounting for the referent informing the myth. Explanation leads from a “surface semantics” born of structural analysis to a “depth semantics” addressing the ultimate referent of the myth. Analysis of the text as a structured whole emerges as a necessary stage “between a naïve interpretation and a critical one, between a surface interpretation and a depth interpretation” (Interpretation Theory, 87). 35. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 202, 132.

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36. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 141–142, 177–178, 185. For Hans-Georg Gadamer understanding is a historically effected event such that a projected historical horizon is engaged and superseded in its fusion with the present horizon. Gadamer describes this as regaining “the concept of a historical past in such a way that they also include our own comprehension of them.” See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1997), 300–307, 369–379. 37. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 143. 38. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 143, 158, 182, 186–187. Ricoeur draws on Gadamer’s understanding of the “play” of heuristic fiction to elaborate the notion of the text’s imaginative variations on both world and ego. Play is not strictly the activity of a subject, for whoever plays is also “played” by the prescriptive the rules of the game. Thus, the playful presentation of the world of the work as a heuristic fiction invites the reader to hand themselves over; “subjectivity forgets itself.” See 185–190. 39. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 143, 186–187. 40. David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, and Hope (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 79. 41. Davies and Barnett, Palgrave Handbook, 15–17. 42. Justo L. González, Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990), 89–100. 43. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 159. Ricoeur’s most completely developed reading theory appears in the Time and Narrative chapter “The World of the Text and the World of the Reader” (3:157–79). After examining various reading theories, he concludes that reading consists of several dialectics, including that of the freedom of imaginative variation and the constraint of a vision of the world. Ricoeur clearly builds on Gadamer’s concepts of the issue (or matter) of the text, the fusion of horizons, and application in this discussion. While this work represents an advance in Ricoeur’s theories of reading and appropriation, the relative underdevelopment of these aspects of his project remains a point of criticism. 44. Davies and Barnett note Richard Paul distinguishes a “strong” sense of critical thinking meaning “the examined life in which skills and dispositions have been incorporated as part of one’s deep-seated personality and moral sense—in short, one’s character,” Palgrave Handbook, 13. See Richard Paul, Critical Thinking: What Every Person Needs to Survive in a Rapidly Changing World (Santa Rosa, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking, 1993).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Davies, Martin. “A Model of Critical Thinking in Higher Education.” In Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, vol. 30. Edited by Michael B. Paulsen, 41–92. Switzerland: Springer International, 2015. Davies, Martin, and Ronald Barnett, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

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Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1997. González, Justo L. Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990. Klemm, David E. The Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur: A Constructive Analysis. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1983. Paul, Richard. Critical Thinking: What Every Person Needs to Survive in a Rapidly Changing World. Santa Rosa, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking, 1993. Ricoeur, Paul. Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Edited by Lewis S. Mudge. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980. ———. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Edited and Translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. ———. The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work. Edited by Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart. Philadelphia: Beacon, 1978. ———. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ———. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ———. “The World of the Text and the World of the Reader.” In Time and Narrative. Vol. 3. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 157– 179. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Schleiermacher, F. D. E. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Edited by Heinz Kimmerle and Translated by James Duke and Jack Forstman. Atlanta: Scholars, 1977. Tracy, David. Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, and Hope. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987. Wales, C. E., and A. H. Nardi. The Paradox of Critical Thinking. Morgantown, WV: Center for Guided Design, 1984.

FOR FURTHER READING Paul Ricoeur. The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Chapter 4

Ricoeur and Transferable Skills Glenn Whitehouse

Current discussions of the mission and value of liberal arts education often oppose skills and content. One side of this debate has seized on the idea that skills assessment can demonstrate the practical value of the liberal arts— especially to inhabitants of that “real world” located somewhere beyond the gates of campus. The other side worries that a skills focus vocationalizes liberal arts education and dilutes the primary mission of the humanities: the interpretation and critique of cultural artifacts and the historical record. This skills versus content debate in pedagogy is analogous to distinctions that have been central to hermeneutical theory: explanation and understanding, truth and method. Paul Ricoeur, it is well known, advocated an interpretive approach that places these terms into a productive dialectic, rather than treating them as a dichotomy as in Dilthey or Gadamer. Here, I will apply Ricoeur’s interpretation theory to the debate over skills in liberal arts pedagogy and advocacy, drawing primarily from two mid-career works in which the explanation/interpretation dialectic was central to Ricoeur’s account of hermeneutics—Interpretation Theory and From Text to Action.1 I will defend a liberal arts curriculum that mixes skills and content as a version of Ricoeur’s famous hermeneutical arc, and will argue that we are justified in highlighting transferable skills to defend the value of liberal arts education. At the same time, Ricoeur’s interpretation theory will help alert us to some of the pitfalls associated with the current focus on skills. While advocates of skills training are justified to remind the university that it is a city of commerce as well as culture, humanists are right to insist that it attend to justice as well as production. In Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, we seek the model for a pedagogy that balances cultivation of practical skills with the humanistic task of meaning-making, and the imperative not to do my neighbor violence. 77

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1. THE SKILLS DEBATE IN HIGHER EDUCATION First, the current debate between skills and content as rationales for liberal arts education: skills are championed as the most valuable outcome of a college education most often when the liberal arts must be defended against skeptics in government, business—or our student’s own households. For instance, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has conducted survey research confirming that employers continue to esteem the skills most commonly associated with liberal arts education, “nearly all those surveyed (93%) agree, ‘a candidate’s demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major.’”2 Employment research on the themes of a “Skills Gap” or the “Future of Work” has joined in affirming the relevance of liberal arts skills in today’s workplace. Recent analysis from McKinsey Consulting concludes that as technology and AI loom larger in the workplace, skills that are not easily automated grow in importance—especially standard liberal arts skills like creativity, critical thinking, decision-making, social, and emotional skills.3 The Strada Institute report Robot Ready likewise trumpets the theme that a technologized workplace will make human skills more—not less—valuable.4 In all, anxiety over a rapidly changing workplace has merged serendipitously with a rediscovery of the continued value of the humanities to motivate a renewed interest in the skills most commonly associated with the liberal arts. But which skills? Employment research and journalism tends to categorize skills via a couple of dichotomies. It’s worth pausing over terminology—both in order to get clear on what we mean by skills education and because our argument will proceed by interrogating the assumptions and values embedded in the language of skills. One such dichotomy is hard versus human skills. “There are those who believe that the ‘hard’ skills of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) are most critical to the future, and those who believe that the uniquely ‘human’ skills of the liberal arts are the ones that will endure in the face of automation.”5 In the context of higher education curriculum, we can associate hard skills with specific disciplinary knowledge destined for application in a specialized work context. This means not only STEM but also the professional colleges of the contemporary university dominated by a workplace focus, including business, health professions, criminal justice, and, to an extent, education. What then are the human skills? Human skills are themselves often divided—between soft skills and transferable skills. The dichotomy is less stark, but consider this list of human skills synonyms: “noncognitive, power, common, transferable, baseline, twenty-first century, interpersonal, talent, life, and professional.”6 We can sort this nomenclature into two themes. “noncognitive,” “interpersonal,” “life”—these terms construe human skills as

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the ones associated with personality traits, emotional life, and social adaptability; skills that are not taught and may even be intrinsic; skills, it is implied, that aren’t really native to the professional realm at all but are borrowed from private and social life. Call these soft skills. “Common,” “transferable, “baseline,” “professional”—these describe human skills as the ones that are general rather than specific, the ones that are taken for granted but shouldn’t be, which become visible in their absence when it’s discovered that a workplace “expert” can’t write a report, or is inept at public speaking, or can’t communicate with coworkers outside his or her specialty. These skills are cognitive—and teachable; they are not content knowledge, but rather general reasoning and communication skills that allow content to be applied or explained; they make up part of every job, and most of some jobs—for example, sales or management. We will prefer the term transferable skills to describe the outcomes of liberal education. With this, we emphasize that the skills taught in the liberal arts are general, that they are not the property of any one academic discipline, and that they apply widely across different workplaces and career types: “these are skills that enable learners to transfer their knowledge from domain to domain in the face of job obsolescence and to learn new skills in demand.”7 As for the skill list, one can look to the competencies of the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) or to the VALUE Rubrics of the AAC&U,8 and see critical thinking, communications, problemsolving, teamwork, intercultural knowledge, among other items. As much as employers and educators have embraced these skills, discussion of them is often haunted by uncertainty over whether they are truly transferable skills— cognitive, teachable, a main ingredient of professional life and practice—or rather merely soft skills—noncognitive, innate, a pleasing side dish complementing the main course of career-specific “hard” skills. But are liberal arts advocates even right to make transferable skills their main exhibit for the defense? Other advocates insist we must look to content rather than skills to justify the enduring relevance of liberal arts education. Heather MacDonald writes, forget the “we teach critical thinking” gambit, and other mealy-mouthed efforts at asserting a vacuous, process-oriented relevance. No, the humanities should step up and proudly proclaim, “We are the purveyors of beauty more lethal than you may possibly be able to bear and knowledge more profound than you can yet fathom . . . Within our precincts are works of unparalleled eloquence, wit and imagination; to die without experiencing them is to have led a life shortchanged.”9

In other words, the value of the humanities is in the primary content objects of humanistic disciplines—the cultural artifacts we interpret, debate, and

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celebrate. For defenders of this stripe, the humanities’ mission is to offer meaning in a contemporary world left purposeless, whether by nihilism or neoliberalism. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, for instance, provide eloquent applications of the “great books” to the task of meaningful living in All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.10 One might call this an aesthetic defense of the humanities, but only if we understand the artwork as having a destiny to uncover meaning in the world and human existence. Other humanists, whose approach to the humanities centers more on moral character or social justice, may still find the idea of transferable skills too vocational to describe the habits of mind cultivated by a liberal arts education. For Martha Nussbaum in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities,11 the payoff of humanistic study is precisely those traits not measured by the standard of productivity—the cultivation of empathetic and ethical individuals attuned to the suffering of others and to the justice claims embedded in complex social situations. For Nussbaum—and for many who take a liberationist approach to the humanities—a crucial feature of humanistic study is that it applies a critical perspective to its objects, a perspective missing from a set of solely careeroriented skills. Whether it stresses meaning-making or justice considerations, the content defense of liberal arts education argues that the humanities have something crucial to tell the world in their own voice, rejecting apologetic concessions to the skills language of the HR department. 2. SOFT SKILLS AND ROMANTICIST HERMENEUTICS The skills versus content debate in liberal arts pedagogy and advocacy bears a family resemblance to some oppositions well known in hermeneutics— explanation versus interpretation, truth versus method. Ricoeur made these dichotomies central to his account of hermeneutics mid-career, using them to distinguish his approach from Gadamer and Dilthey. I will dwell on this analogy between pedagogy and hermeneutics for the remainder of the chapter, using Ricoeur’s interpretation theory to illuminate transferable skills, as well as to diagnose the pitfalls involved in their use. The questions we will put to this analogy are, first, whether we can isolate a sense of “transferable skills” that will ground the professional relevance of liberal arts education; second, whether skills versus content is a forced choice, or if there is a pedagogy that could put transferable skills and humanities content in fruitful dialogue; and third, whether that dialogue can bring ethical considerations to bear on professional education, sufficient to deserve a place in the just university. First, explanation versus interpretation. This is the opposition—rooted in Schleiermacher’s practice and theorized by Dilthey—that dominated

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romanticist hermeneutics. Ricoeur examines these terms, partly as an historian of hermeneutics and partly to distinguish his own position from his nineteenth-century predecessors. Hermeneutics was identified with interpretation—or rather understanding, of which interpretation is a development— because Dilthey needed an epistemology that could ground and legitimize the human sciences alongside the sciences of nature. “Explanation finds its paradigmatic field of application in the natural sciences . . . And the appropriate correlate of explanation is nature understood as the common horizon of facts, hypotheses, verifications, and deductions.” Understanding on the other hand, “has to do with the experience of other subjects or other minds similar to our own . . . The immediate types of expression are meaningful because they refer directly to the experience of the other mind which they try to convey.”12 Dilthey posits two methods for two spheres of reality—nature and mind. The methodology of understanding is grounded on the claim that in interpreting the expressions of another mind, I grasp something like myself; “‘empathy’ as the transference of ourselves into another’s psychic life is the principle common to every kind of understanding.”13 For romanticist hermeneutics, then, interpretation is ultimately grounded in individual psychology. While Dilthey did try to articulate procedures of validation that would give the human sciences a claim on objectivity, his hermeneutics struggles to shed the subjectivist, emotive, and individualist baggage resulting from his move of opposing explanation to understanding, and grounding understanding in the interpreter’s capacity for sympathetic relation to individual others through feeling. Ricoeur’s account of romanticist hermeneutics resembles the skills debate in higher education. The dangers of completely separating explanation from interpretation are akin to the pitfalls of dividing skills into hard versus soft. If hard skills comprehend scientific knowledge, quantitative analysis, technology, and industry-specific competencies, what is left for “soft” skills? In the professional world, the answers tend to resemble the subjectivist and individualist model of understanding that Ricoeur (and Gadamer) criticized in romanticist hermeneutics. To have “soft skills” is to have empathy, to be good at maintaining relationships, to be comfortable in social settings and effective at interpersonal communication, and to exhibit “leadership” and inspire others. What do soft skills so described have in common with understanding as construed in romanticist hermeneutics? First, both are based on an empathy that is assumed to be innate. For Dilthey, “every human science . . . presupposes a primordial capacity to transpose oneself into the mental life of others.”14 The language of soft skills just makes this gift a bit more exclusive—some of us “get” people better than others. Second, they are skills for connecting with others as individuals. For Schleiermacher, “what must be

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reached is the subjectivity of the one who speaks . . . language becomes an instrument at the service of individuality.”15 The person with soft skills is one who can “read” other people’s talk and behavior as expressions of their needs, motives and individual traits—the very skills that might suit one for sales, or middle management. Finally, soft skills are conceptualized primarily in the language of psychology. With their orientation to mind, feeling, and the individual person, soft skills—like Diltheyan interpretation—looks no farther than psychology when seeking expert validation. Hence, the ubiquity of popular psychology in business books and social media. If the soft side of business is individual people, soft skills will look to the science that takes the individual as its object. What, if anything, is wrong with carving up the professional world in this way—hard skills for technology, expertise, and numbers; soft skills for motivating and managing people? Ricoeur’s critiques of romanticist hermeneutics give us a clue. For one, romanticism, “stipulates as the ultimate aim of interpretation, not what the text says, but who says it.”16 But this is just the error of psychologism—conflating the meaning of a message with the mental act of its sender or receiver, instead of attending to what that message is about, what it reveals of reality.17 To divert attention from a text to the mind of its author or reader is to miss what the text tells us about the world. Similarly, to identify professional skills with personal attitudes or “mindsets” is to divert focus from the actual workplace problem or task. It is disconcerting to peruse a bookstore business section or one’s LinkedIn feed and find little other than self-help advice offering to aid us to unlock potential in ourselves or others. Isn’t any business advice actually about business?—one asks, before registering for another motivational seminar. If the language and attitudes of therapeutic individualism have thoroughly colonized the ways people today understand their professional life, it may be because we take the split between hard and soft skills too seriously—trusting product/service, strategy, and organizational structure to “objective” expertise, while delegating to the human realm the “subjective” task of managing feelings, channeling ambitions, or licking psychic wounds. More insidiously, the soft tones of “soft skills” can mask agendas of control and occlude injustices. Ricoeur shares with Gadamer a certain suspicion that the epistemology of separation between objective and subjective poles is motivated by a desire of the thinking and willing subject to assert control over itself, rejecting the limitations of belonging to the body, history, and society. “[Dilthey’s] starting point continues to be self-consciousness, as self-mastery,”18 Gadamer diagnoses. Ricoeur generalizes the point into a kind of phenomenology of the autonomous self, “it is . . . in the face of the necessity both outside and inside myself that my consciousness tends to recoil on itself, to make a circle with itself, in order to expel outside, into an empirical

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subject, these limitations . . . By this act of expulsion reflection tends to posit itself as a universal constituting ego.”19 For Ricoeur, the self of modernity is more than a posit of epistemology; it is an active, even desperate bid for self-control, seen less as Levinas’ violent totalization, but as something a bit more personal and pathetic. In the workplace, a focus on the subjective side can likewise be motivated by a will to make the world mine by making over the self. As sociologist Robert Bellah and the other authors of Habits of the Heart noted, contemporary American life is dominated by the types of the manager and the therapist, and their methods are often mutually supportive.20 The professional self, as reflected in the mirror of pop-psychology business advice, is at once an anxious and ambitious creature, obsessed with achieving confidence of success through control of its own “mindset.” Hence, much soft skills language exhibits an insistent tone of self-help and even self-mastery, as the psychology of motivation and the habits of effectiveness are valued as the armor of the conquering self in the quest after professional success. So much for my self-image. But for management techniques grounded in therapeutic individualism, “soft skills” can also mean my facility at playing to the motivations, ideals, and feelings of others to achieve organizational goals—otherwise described, at manipulation. One of Bellah’s sources aptly sums up the ambiguities of management styles that embrace the soft skills: “’She’ll bring in homemade cookies and flowers for your desk [and] at the same time she’ll do anything necessary to get the organizational results she wants and advance her career . . . What’s so frustrating to me is this confusion between what’s personal and what isn’t, not being able to sort it out. There’s this sense of seduction and feeling scared you’re going to be used.”21 But beyond manipulative treatment of individual others, the subjective outlook associated with soft skills can also occlude the injustice embedded in structures and social norms. If self-awareness and skillful negotiation of interpersonal relations are the core of soft skills therapeutically conceived, they offer scant resources to critique the values or effects of institutions; indeed, therapeutic individualism encourages us to adjust to institutional constraints rather than change them, and tends to explicitly discourage a “moralizing” approach.22 Following the dichotomy between subjective “soft” and objective “hard” skills, one might try responding that soft skills needn’t include justice—that the hard concerns of justice and institutions can be handled by the lawyers and by company policy. But the crisis of justice uncovered by movements like MeToo, Times Up, and Black Lives Matter have shown us that it’s not enough to leave justice to experts and policies, while just trying to get along with others in whatever institutional context I find myself. To the contrary, unjust structures are composed of everyday interactions and practices, such that addressing the injustice requires reforming social practices.

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Being nice and having good intentions are inadequate to answer the call to justice; worse, a strategy of self-advancement through adjusting the self to thrive in institutional contexts, is downright complicit in injustice. To the extent that these features describe soft skills, they deserve a hard look. So dividing education into hard and soft skills seems to lead us into pedagogical dilemmas—can we teach a personality trait? psychologism—focusing on the person rather than the tasks and projects they do; and ethical blindness—where attending to the dear self becomes a license to ignore the justice questions and structural inequities attending anyone’s professional life. If soft skills are a problematic way to characterize my strengths as a professional, it’s not only because they divert attention from the content and purpose of my professional activities (“leadership” toward what?) but also because they occlude questions of justice that can appear to us once we cease to make the achieving self the center of attention. We will have to see whether justice concerns fare better if we construe human skills as transferable skills rather than soft skills. 3. TRANSFERABLE SKILLS AND THE ARC OF INTERPRETATION The second opposition, which structures hermeneutics in the postmodern era, is truth versus method. These terms of course make up the title of Truth and Method, and form “an opposition that seems to me to be the mainspring of Gadamer’s work, namely the opposition between alienating distantiation and belonging,”23 Gadamer is wary of exegetical methods that distance the interpreter from the text in the name of objectivity; he argues for a hermeneutics rooted in dialogue with the text and belonging to a common history. Ricoeur, we know, was skeptical whether the ontological approach and rejection of method in Heidegger and Gadamer could ever allow hermeneutics to reengage with the practical work of the human sciences, “the question is to what extent the work deserves to be called Truth AND Method, and whether it ought not to be titled instead Truth OR Method.”24 This slick burn against Gadamer identifies a serious dilemma for postmodern hermeneutics, “either we adopt the methodological attitude and lose the ontological density of the reality we study, or we adopt the attitude of truth and must then renounce the objectivity of the human sciences.”25 Ricoeur’s response to this dilemma of truth or method was to seek complementarity between them.26 He did so through an ingenious synthesis combining the apparently opposed attitudes of explanation and understanding/interpretation into a three-step interpretive process, based on the wager that it is “possible to locate explanation and understanding at two different

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stages of a unique hermeneutical arc.”27 This arc was presented in multiple ways through Ricoeur’s career. In Interpretation Theory, he begins with an initial understanding—a guess—but one that guesses at the meaning of the text rather than the mind of the author. With this redirection toward the text, Ricoeur can fruitfully appropriate some features of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical circle, emphasizing that we first understand the text as a whole, as an individual, singular thing, and that it is open to several readings that relate whole and parts in different ways.28 Ricoeur borrows from romanticist hermeneutics the term for the second stage, explanation; but he rethinks what explanation or “method” is. Rather than scientific investigation with its quantification, objectification, and distance, Ricoeur adopts structural linguistics and other sciences of the sign as the model for explaining texts. Linguistics abstracts structure from use, and suspends communication to analyze its parts; but it does so from within the domain of language. “On the basis of this abstraction, a new kind of explanatory attitude may be extended toward the literary object. This new attitude is not borrowed from an area of knowledge alien to language, but it comes from the same field, the semiological field.”29 In sourcing the explanatory attitude from within language, Ricoeur hopes to gain analytical rigor and a critical moment, while turning alienating distance into productive distantiation.30 Finally, interpretation or comprehension, the third stage of the arc, has Ricoeur addressing the themes of Heideggerian or Gadamerian ontological hermeneutics. For Ricoeur, “what I appropriate is a proposed world. The latter is not behind the text, as a hidden intention would be, but in front of it, as that which the world unfolds, discovers, reveals.”31 Interpretation, in the language of Heidegger, is a process of unfolding possibilities—in Gadamerspeak, of merging horizons. But that third ontological reading is also a critical one, in as much as the world of the text is revealed after formalizing explanation and by means of it: “we consider structural analysis as one stage—albeit a necessary one—between a naïve interpretation and a critical one.”32 Now we can use the hermeneutical arc to distinguish transferable skills. We will identify transferable skills with the second stage of interpretation— explanation. Ricoeur’s revision of that term showed that explanation or method is a productive stage on the way to deeper and more critical understanding, contra those who insisted that hermeneutics concern itself solely with uncovering truth or understanding the author. We hope to find that transferable skills likewise form a crucial stage—both in preparing students for professional life and in justifying liberal arts education—rather than being a distraction from those goals. When we designate transferable skills, we are thinking of items such as written communication, critical thinking, inquiry, and analysis—just to name a few of the AAC&U VALUE outcomes.33 How does Ricoeur’s version of

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explanation help us think these skills? First, just as explanatory methods originating in the study of language have the advantage of sharing the same kind of reality as the text being interpreted, transferable skills are likewise native to practices in the classroom and workplace—those very practices which they seek to measure and analyze. This is often highlighted by the AAC&U, who pioneered “authentic assessment” of skills: “VALUE draws evidence from the actual courses and teachers at an institution, assessing the learning artifacts . . . produced by students to demonstrate their achievement of specific learning outcomes.”34 For instance, in assessing the skill of written communication, we use general categories of composition and rhetoric which name the very writing elements that instructors and students work on in the composition workshop—or that a professional communicator considers when tailoring a message to an audience or a format. The fact that transferable skills are native to professional and academic practices helps set transferable skills apart from alienating kinds of assessment. Trudy Banta, writing to an AAC&U audience, notes that standardized testing is experienced as alienating precisely because it is alien to classroom contexts—that it truncates the rich complexity of learning to a few simple measures; by contrast, “Authentic assessment—using actual student work products . . . is the best type of measurement for suggesting directions for improvement.”35 In education, it is really those standardized measures—SAT scores, state assessment tests— that are justly critiqued for having the features of Gadamerian “method”— alienation from life and practice—or Diltheyan “explanation”—importing a method suited to a different domain. Transferable skills by contrast belong to the domain they describe. Second, transferable skills are abstracted from practice and contribute to the further development of practices in professional and academic life. When considering in what way transferable skills are abstract or formal, it is useful to admit a certain ambiguity in Ricoeur’s use of “explanation,” at least as presented in Interpretation Theory. Explanation can be construed in terms of the transition from guess to validation—from the first to the middle stage of the hermeneutical arc. Here Ricoeur sees the beginning of explanation in the consideration of texts as mediations of parts and wholes, as individual works, and as layers of meanings.36 In this regard, explanatory methods are not so alien to the primary production and reading of the text, and the course leading from first reading to interpretation and life application is not fully interrupted. If this stage is only the beginning of explanation for Ricoeur, it may be because these validation methods were also known to romanticist hermeneutics and are utilized in jurisprudence; for both realms, the danger that interpretation will simply end with the intent of the author or “the Founders” rather than with the application of the law or text is still real.

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Ricoeur specifies explanation also in a second way, in terms of the transition between the middle stage of the arc and full critical understanding. This is the kind of explanation that appears when we interrupt meaning as communication, treat the text as an object of analysis, and apply methods of formalizing abstraction—structural linguistics is his preferred model.37 Explanation of this kind shares some of the alienating character of Gadamer’s method, in that these formal methods do not initially appear to be continuous with language in its ordinary function of mediating meaning; no one initially reading Sophocles, for instance, is going to come up with anything resembling LeviStrauss’ structural reading of the Oedipus myth. It is only in the application of text to life that the role of structure in uncovering deep existential meanings of the myth becomes apparent. In noting that transferable skills are abstracted from practice, I associate them primarily with explanation in the first sense; but we will find the ambiguity instructive. Let us look closer at this idea that a transferable skill is abstracted from practice. When Ricoeur discusses the validation of guesses in Interpretation Theory, he stresses that the act of interpretive judgment construes the text as an individual whole, “first, to construe the verbal meaning of a text is to construe it as a whole . . . Second, to construe a text is to construe it as an individual.”38 But to treat the text as an individual is precisely to analyze the unique way it deploys features common to many texts, “the work of discourse, as this unique work, can only be reached by a process of narrowing down the scope of generic concepts, which include the literary genre, the class of texts to which this text belongs, and the codes and structures that intersect in this text.”39 In making these judgments, the interpreter uses categories similar to the ones that guided the writer in producing the work. Genres, codes, “the function of these generative devices is to produce new entities of language.”40 Writing, as much as it produces singular entities, is subject to the general rules of a craft; it is in applying these rules to content that the writer crafts a work as an individual whole, open to interpretation. Notable here is the commonality between the rules of composition the author used to generate the text, and the concepts used by the reader in interpreting it. They are complementary or even identical, to the point where we can say the explanatory concepts used in interpretation encapsulate a kind of craft knowledge of the practice. Applying this to education, we can see how transferable skills relate to practice. Take Ricoeur’s rules for reading and writing and suppose we are assessing the skill written communication. When we give composition students sample texts to read, it is not so they can simply mimic the examples, but to provide models of how a master deployed the rules of craft to communicate content in a particular context. Our aim is that the student be able to use the same rules and guidelines to craft effective messages of her own,

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with a different content and context; but to reach that point, teacher and student must be able to use those general rules as guides for practice, standards of excellence, and benchmarks of achievement. The skill, then, is a common measure of excellence in the practice, abstracted from the many individual works the student may read or produce. The skill is also a general language to describe the practice—writing in this case—useful for making the processes and elements of writing visible for reflective practice of the craft. The generality of skills language is related to the detachment of meaning from the event of speaking that occurs when language is inscribed in a text. Ricoeur makes much of this distantiation in his hermeneutical theory, arguing that the objectivizing character of explanation is justified to the extent that we do encounter texts as object-like works.41 Among all the theoretical consequences of distantiation, we should notice this one when considering skills language as abstraction from practice—it is precisely when discussing how the text is distanced from spoken discourse that Ricoeur starts invoking literary terms familiar from Composition 101: for example, grammar, author, reader, audience, sense, genre, situation, description, meaning.42 In other words, it is in the abstraction that comes from treating its product as an object that craft knowledge in a field like writing can achieve self-reflective clarity, name and analyze its parts, and hence become teachable to students beyond the pedagogy of imitation. Written communication is the skill named here, but similar relations of practice and abstraction can hold for other transferable skills. Critical thinking gives clarity and structure to a set of analytic skills applied to an argument in the philosophy seminar—or the boardroom. Ethical Reasoning names and captures features of deliberation about ethically charged cases, in the judge’s chambers or in the HR department (one hopes). Abstraction brings skill from the blindness of mere example—“If you have to ask, there’s no point in telling”—to the point of pedagogy—“Let me explain how to do it (and why we do it that way).” We can think of abstraction characterizing transferable skills in another way, however—one that recalls Ricoeur’s use of structuralism as a model for explanation. I refer to the use of rubrics as skill assessment tools. When structuralism analyzes a narrative text such as a myth, the results take the form of a table, as in Levi-Strauss’ famous arrangement of elements of the Oedipus myth into four columns.43 When universities assess skills, they likewise use tables—the widely adopted AAC&U VALUE rubrics, among others. Besides just the visual likeness, the table and the rubric share a few features. First, they analyze their objects into themes—blood relations, names, and plot events for the myth; issues, evidence, context, and conclusions to analyze a skill like critical thinking.44 They also dechronologize their object, taking a linear narrative or classroom event and spatializing it—thus making the assessment categories a new text-object to read. Structural analysis can arrange together text elements

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of heterogenous kinds—plot points, word etymologies, and kinship relations— and display them for analysis. Likewise, skill rubrics can be arranged to show the object of assessment as a manifestation of multiple skills—for instance, at my institution, we use parts of the Critical Thinking, Oral Communication, Problem-Solving, and Information Literacy rubrics all on the same “performance task” assessment. Finally, the tables and charts of structuralism add a quasi-scientific, quantitative, and data element to literary analysis. Likewise, the rubric turns a skill into a number—reportable, comparable, and translatable to other institutional contexts. For all that, it would be hard to say the skills rubric reaches the same level of distantiation from practice as the structuralist analysis. It’s more accurate to think of the rubric as adding an additional degree of abstraction to the first kind of explanation discussed above. Thinking transferable skills in terms of Ricoeur’s explanation is an improvement over construing them as soft skills. Transferable skills taken this way have analytical power since they define a list of distinct skills; they are integral to practice in the school or workplace, in a way distinct from hard or technical skills; and they are teachable rather than supposedly innate personality traits. Still, this version of transferable skills leaves us with some reason to be dissatisfied, or at least wary. For one thing, skills still seem to be focused on the person, which was one of the confusions of romanticist hermeneutics. Yes, transferable skills point us to traits we can analyze, apply, and teach, and they avoid the amorphous mess of “soft skills.” But in naming characteristics of the person rather than focusing on work she does, have we simply gained a higher-order version of soft skills? Are we flirting with the error of psychologism again? For another thing, transferable skills by themselves do not provide any great insight into human life or purpose. In Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, the main payoff of explanation was that it helped us reach the “deep structure” of the text and enable an interpretation that goes beyond the details of the story, opening up an enhanced understanding of the world and oneself. On the face of it, transferable skills do not yield anything of this kind—the skill list is well short of a philosophical anthropology. However much they enable professional success, skills leave us incomplete—and force us to ask again whether those who celebrate humanities content might be correct to caution against invoking skills as the justification for liberal arts education. 4. EDUCATION FOR SKILLS AND CONTENT—AND JUSTICE I’d like to defend the defense of liberal arts through transferable skills—but only if we understand skills and content as partners in pedagogy. At one level,

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a Ricoeurian justification for a both/and approach is obvious. If transferable skills resemble explanation, and explanation is one stage of an interpretive arc, flanked on both sides by understanding, then skills too can be expected to play a limited role in an educational process, complementing broader goals for understanding and application of content. However, let’s look at the details and ask whether and where transferable skills can be connected to a robust liberal arts education combining skills with content. First, we can say that skills training itself benefits from being taught in integration with content. Recall the claim that skills language is a kind of abstraction from craft knowledge internal to a practice. We saw that a pedagogy of skills relies on analyzing, describing, and teaching features that are common to all the singular objects the practice might produce, and that those same features serve as analytic categories to interpret products of that practice. In the case of writing, that meant the study of content (literature) and the cultivation of writing skills are complementary. We want students both to appreciate works of literature and to become writers themselves. The skill is a pause between appreciation and writing—the distantiation of a set of rules and standards abstracted from individual works. Formalizing rules of the skill helps divert the student’s writing from unthinking mimickry of previous examples—it makes me accountable to the standards of the practice, not just for making my piece look like the model essay. Conversely, studying masterworks helps prevent student writing from becoming a hidebound application of the rules of composition—those works remind me that writing skills are tools to address particular problems in unique contexts. Hence, even if we cared only about teaching skills effectively, there would be good reasons to integrate skills and content in our pedagogy. This is really the insight behind “writing across the curriculum” initiatives. To nurture our students into effective writers, it is not enough to rely on a skills course in composition or rhetoric taught freshman year. Students must learn to contextualize writing in their disciplines, take up models of good writing from different fields, and apply the craft of clear expression to the task of demonstrating content knowledge. Similarly with critical thinking and argumentation: it is quite common for philosophy students to experience their formal logic requirement as a jarring disconnection from the rest of their studies. With good reason—it is mostly through the process of struggling with real philosophical questions and texts that those students hone the skill of argumentation. Without this content engagement, natural deduction is little more than a new form of Sudoku. Replacing core content classes with a suite of skills courses paradoxically would be one of the worst ways to teach skills. It is only in application to meaningful content that students master the skill—master in the craft sense of being able to produce a new work with it.

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Second, we should connect skills with content in order to deliver an education attentive to standards of justice. Notice that the lists of transferable skills are typically broader in scope than a set of strictly career-focused skills. Taking the AAC&U list as canonical, we see, besides the usual suspects of critical thinking and communication, rubrics for civic engagement, ethical reasoning, intercultural knowledge, among others.45 The acknowledgment of civic and ethical responsibility among the core skills of higher education should alleviate some of the concern that a skills focus will ignore questions of justice, ethics, and culture. These responsibility-focused outcomes can be included in the list along with the others, but that is because they abstract content that was written into the curriculum to begin with. One of the hallmarks of liberal arts content is its incorporation of noninstrumental values, cultural norms, the question of the good life, and models of a just society. That content can be the point of application for the responsibility skills listed above, but only if students are studying it. For the sake of justice, we should resist isolating skills from content. Transferable skills are an abstraction from the curriculum—a purely commercial curriculum will be reflected in a solely instrumental list of skills. As liberal arts advocates, we fight for a university curriculum whose content reflects broader concerns than just a practical vocation. But we should not endorse a détente that accepts placing skills like ethical reasoning, civic engagement, and intercultural knowledge to the side of more “career-focused” skills—a job for Gen Ed or Arts & Sciences, but not the rest of the university. We should insist that justice considerations be integrated into the teaching of the very skills students use to act in the “real world.” This is a point where the liberal arts advocates we mentioned at the start can fall flat. The aesthetic defense too often treats meaning and beauty as the exclusive gift of the cultural realm, never to be seen in the workplace. But this is to accept too much of romanticist hermeneutics—the split between an objective public and subjective private realm, the relegation of meaning to the subjective side. To the contrary, we constantly hear students today calling for meaningful work—work that engages their selves, reflects their values, and “makes a difference.” A pedagogy that treats career skills and ethical-cultural meaning as separate spheres is ill-equipped to address this call. But the social justice defense of liberal arts education often also accepts this split. The call to define liberal arts in opposition to the “profit” part of the university, and the revolutionary utopian spirit that inspires much humanities work, can give the impression that the workplace is no place for justice. But this sets our students up for cynicism and ethical paralysis once they set out to make a living—as they must. Again, contemporary movements such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter are instructive here. They do not so much stand outside the workplace as seek to transform its norms and practices. To

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the extent they are beginning to have an impact, it is because they are calling on professionals to rethink how skills like leadership or teamwork must be deployed in social contexts suffused with racist and sexist norms; what critical thinking means when what I must see to be critical is the structural racism embedded in my own institution; how to reform effective communication in light of the awareness that our very words disempower others. It doesn’t help the cause to act as if the hard work of justice is separate from the work we do every day and the skills we bring to the workplace. Rather, liberal arts educators should embrace the task of rewriting professional norms and skills to equip our students to bend their future workplaces in the direction of justice. We should regard transferable skills as tools for change and not just survival or success. While it is true that skills name capacities of a person, the focus on the self apparent in skills language should not lead us to conclude that transferable skills are some kind of personal brag sheet divorced from the task of ethical responsibility and the quest for meaningful living. Indeed, the liberal arts ideal of paideia has always insisted that we think cultivation of personal excellence and engagement with the world together—and Ricoeurian hermeneutics follows suit, by correlating interpretation of culture with reflection on the self. By themselves, skills are not a plan for the good life or the just society; but they can be part of both quests. We noted that transferable skills are fruitfully understood as rules and standards associated with a practice. Ricoeur brought the idea of standards of a practice into Oneself as Another,46 his hermeneutics of the self. Borrowing from Alasdair MacIntyre, Ricoeur claims that standards of excellence in a practice are tied to internal goods accessible through that practice—and that those goods in turn are part of a “life plan” we form via “integration of actions in global projects, including, for example, professional life, family life, leisure time, and community and political life.”47 In other words, professional life and the skills that enable it form part of the broad aim of the good life, which for Ricoeur is the ethical aim, the first ethical interpretation of life. Skills certainly aren’t sufficient to make up the good life, but neither are they intruders in it—virtues are ultimately made of the same stuff as skills, once directed toward and subordinated to the good. Similarly, we needn’t exclude our students’ professional identity from a liberal arts curriculum focused on the good life. As Ricoeur and MacIntyre showed, the excellences emerging from professional practice form one of our primary ways of accessing goods. These goods, to be sure, must be coordinated, prioritized, fit into a life story, made responsible to others both proximate and anonymous—but this is all the more reason to put transferable skills into dialogue with the rest of liberal arts education, and not treat them as an intruder, compromise, or unpleasant chore.

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We began with a question for liberal arts education—skills or content? The analogy with Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory, focused on its own options— explanation versus interpretation, truth versus method—led us to embrace a dialogue or synthesis between skills and content. No surprises there, given the choice of guide! Still, acknowledging Ricoeur never met an “or” he couldn’t turn into an “and,” I think he did succeed in establishing the substantive point that explanation is a productive part of the interpretive process, and not the opposite or the enemy of understanding. Similarly, I would claim that skills are integral to a liberal arts education, so long as they are integrated with the rich content of meaning and justice that make up the heart of liberal arts disciplines. The idea of a transferable skill, conceived with a little help from Ricoeur, provides a measure of achievement that can be integrated in this way, both with our students’ professional aims and with the call of justice, which should not only be taught within the confines of the just university but also be taught by our graduates once released into a “real world” that needs their skills for change. NOTES 1. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: TCU Press, 1976); Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991). 2. Hart Research Associates, It Takes More Than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success (Washington, DC: Hart Research Associates, 2013). 3. McKinsey Global Institute, Skill Shift: Automation and the Future of the Workforce (McKinsey Global Institute, 2018), 11, 16. 4. Michele R. Weise et al., Robot Ready: Human+ Skills for the Future of Work (Indianapolis: Strada Institute for the Future of Work, 2018); Michele R. Weise, Andrew R. Hanson, and Yustina Saleh, The New Geography of Skills: Regional Skill Shapes for the New Learning Ecosystem (Indianapolis: Strada Institute for the Future of Work, 2019). 5. Weise et al., Robot Ready, 3. 6. Weise et al., Robot Ready, 7. 7. Weise et al., Robot Ready, 7. 8. “VALUE Institute Overview,” Association of American Colleges and Universities, accessed April 17, 2020, http://www​.aacu​.org​/VALUEInstitute; “Career Readiness Defined,” National Association of Colleges and Employers, accessed April 17, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nac​​eweb.​​org​/c​​areer​​-read​​iness​​/comp​​etenc​​ies​/c​​areer​​-read​​​iness​​ -defi​​ned/.​ 9. Heather Mac Donald, in Peter Wood, “The Liberal Arts are in Trouble – Should We Celebrate?” online article, National Association of Scholars, accessed

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April 17, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nas​​.org/​​blogs​​/arti​​cle​/t​​he​_li​​beral​​_arts​​_are_​​in​_tr​​ouble​​ _shou​​​ld​_we​​_cele​​brate​. 10. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). 11. Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, updated ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 12. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 72–73. 13. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 73. 14. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 59, emphasis original. 15. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 57. 16. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 62, emphasis original. 17. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 89–95. 18. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 72. 19. Paul Ricoeur, “The Unity of the Voluntary and the Involuntary as a Limit Situation,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Boston: Beacon, 1978), 9. 20. Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985). 21. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 125–126. 22. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 124–130. 23. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 75; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1989). 24. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 71. 25. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 75. 26. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 53. 27. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 164. 28. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 76–78. 29. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 81. 30. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 75–88. 31. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 87–88, emphasis original. 32. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 87. 33. Terrel Rhodes, Assessing Outcomes and Improving Achievement: Tips and Tools for Using Rubrics (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2010). 34. “VALUE Approach,” accessed April 21, 2020, https://www​.aacu​.org​/value​ -approach 35. Trudy Banta, “Our Primitive Art of Measurement,” Peer Review 13, no. 4 (2011) / 14, no. 1 (2012), 35. 36. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 75–79. 37. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 80–86. 38. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 76–77. 39. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 77. 40. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 32. 41. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 80–84. 42. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 25–37.

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43. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 114–116. 44. “Critical Thinking VALUE Rubric,” Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2009, https​:/​/ww​​w​.aac​​u​.org​​/valu​​e​/rub​​rics/​​criti​​cal​​-t​​hinki​​ng. 45. “VALUE Rubrics,” Association of American Colleges and Universities, accessed April 24, 2020, https://www​.aacu​.org​/value​-rubrics. 46. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 47. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 176–177.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Association of American Colleges and Universities. “Critical Thinking VALUE Rubric.” 2009. https​:/​/ww​​w​.aac​​u​.org​​/valu​​e​/rub​​rics/​​criti​​cal​​-t​​hinki​​ng. ———. “VALUE Institute Overview.” Accessed April 17, 2020. http://www​.aacu​ .org​/VALUEInstitute. ———. “VALUE Rubrics.” Accessed April 24, 2020. https://www​.aacu​.org​/value​ -rubrics. Banta, Trudy. “Our Primitive Art of Measurement.” Peer Review 13, no. 4 (2011)/14, no. 1 (2012), 35. Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Stephen Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Sean Dorrance Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. New York: Crossroad, 1989. Hart Research Associates. It Takes More Than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success. Washington, DC: Hart Research Associates, 2013. Mac Donald, Heather. In Peter Wood, “The Liberal Arts are in Trouble – Should We Celebrate?” Online article. National Association of Scholars. Accessed April 17, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nas​​.org/​​blogs​​/arti​​cle​/t​​he​_li​​beral​​_arts​​_are_​​in​_tr​​ouble​​_shou​​l​ d​_we​​_cele​​brate​. McKinsey Global Institute. Skill Shift: Automation and the Future of the Workforce. McKinsey Global Institute, 2018. National Association of Colleges and Employers. “Career Readiness Defined.” Accessed April 17, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nac​​eweb.​​org​/c​​areer​​-read​​iness​​/comp​​etenc​​ies​ /c​​areer​​-read​​i​ness​​-defi​​ned/. Nussbaum. Martha. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, updated ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Rhodes, Terrel. Assessing Outcomes and Improving Achievement: Tips and Tools for Using Rubrics. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2010.

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Ricoeur, Paul. “The Unity of the Voluntary and the Involuntary as a Limit Situation.” In The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Edited by Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart, 3–19. Boston: Beacon, 1978. ———. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. ———. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. ———. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Edited by Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart. Boston: Beacon, 1978. Weise, Michele R., Andrew R. Hanson, and Yustina Saleh. The New Geography of Skills: Regional Skill Shapes for the New Learning Ecosystem. Indianapolis: Strada Institute for the Future of Work, 2019. Weise, Michele R., Andrew R. Hanson, Rob Sentz, and Yustina Saleh. Robot Ready: Human+ Skills for the Future of Work. Indianapolis: Strada Institute for the Future of Work, 2018.

Chapter 5

Fallible Pedagogy How to Balance Liberation and Evaluation with Compassion Daniel Boscaljon

This chapter builds on reflections concerning my past twenty years teaching within and beyond the formal university system. My claims originate from my context: student populations consisting of low- to middle-class white students, often from rural or suburban spaces in the American Midwest. Considering my pedagogy through the lens of Paul Ricoeur and the Just University pushed me to reconsider my teaching through the lens of Paolo Freire’s radical appeals to justice and Maxine Greene’s discussion of freedom in education. What follows is an idealized vision of teaching literature and theology that I believe applies to other humanities disciplines. My primary goal is to articulate how Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology (focusing on his work in Fallible Man) can underpin pedagogies of liberation. My secondary goal is to discuss how teachers can fulfill obligations to their institutions and their students by providing a just, consistent basis for evaluation focused on testing for fallibility rather than mastery. 1. THE CHALLENGE OF BALANCING FREEDOM AND JUSTICE In his short essay “The Tasks of the Political Educator,” Ricoeur commends three tasks to educators. Each of these tasks presumes a value of individual liberation, achieved in community through the process of thinking hermeneutically.

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1) To aim for democratic economics, by helping students understand that society results from “collective creation,” which thus entails a “collective responsibility.” This requires a practical commitment to teaching participation within a larger context and tradition.1 2) To focus on the relation of ethics and politics by balancing an indirect ethic of conviction with a more direct ethic of responsibility. As an example, Ricoeur describes how utopic visions must balance roles for a human totality with the realization of individual vocations. This requires teaching students to balance their subjective sense of correctness with more universal expectations and how to apply this in concrete situations.2 3) To balance the potential opened by an emerging universal technical order with an appreciation for singular cultural personalities. Because not all elements of traditional culture are appropriate to subsequent social iterations, Ricoeur suggests that societies embrace only those traditional elements that are susceptible to “reinterpretation,” preserving spiritual elements that take into account historical limitations as a foundation that “permits modern societies to resist the leveling to which the consumer society submits.” This requires helping students both gain both an appreciation for what both technology and tradition enable, and where each falls short. 3 To accomplish these tasks, instructors enable students to become hermeneutical thinkers, developing their innate capacity into a self-aware capability. The movement from capacity to capability requires both negative freedom (the absence of restraint) and positive freedom (in the form of exercising responsibility for one’s self). In America, because the former is celebrated and the latter neglected, education often means teaching that freedom is a process, not a property: positive freedom must be achieved, not given. As Maxine Greene describes in The Dialectic of Freedom, there has to be a surpassing of a constraining or deficient “reality,” actually perceived as deficient . . . Made conscious of lacks, they may move (in their desire to repair them) toward a “field of possibles,” what is possible or realizable for them. . . . They do not reach out for fulfillment if they do not feel impeded somehow, and if they are not enabled to name the obstacles that stand in their way. At once, the very existence of obstacles depends on the desire to reach toward wider spaces for fulfillment, to expand options, to know alternatives.4

This emphasizes Ricoeur’s recognition of how education empowers students to meet human needs. Greene’s process of imagining, naming, and acting seem important components of Ricoeur’s tasks of an educator. Further,

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Greene’s process provides concrete steps to help teachers know how to move from capacity to capability.5 Educational institutions inevitably provide lessons concerning functional definitions of justice, sometimes as explicit content. My work in religion and in literature taught me much about power dynamics that lead to oppression, and I found my colleagues throughout the humanities had reached similar conclusions about how systemic oppression creates obstacles for everyday life. We wanted our students to learn about the obstacles and ways to surmount them so that they, too, could lead liberated, authentic lives. This inspired my imagining a classroom designed for liberation. Obstacles to this imagined classroom quickly arose. It was possible to design a syllabus that introduced students to critical theories, and to provide space for peer-led discussions through a framework that augmented student awareness; nonetheless, most educational institutions—supported by ideological and economic frameworks—depend on a system in which instructors are authorized and mandated to evaluate students. Formal conditions subvert otherwise liberating content: even the most inspired classrooms comprise compromised environments that undermine the efficacy of attempts to educate toward liberation. When instructors fail to reflect on evaluation in light of liberation, it risks deploying the quiet mode of social violence that objectifies students, reconstituting the students as obedient rather than autonomous. The difficulty of balancing justice and freedom relative to my duties as a teacher posed an obstacle to my teaching—it was after naming it that I could then devise a plan of action that would free me to liberate my students. Acting invited me to respond to a situation of unwanted authority by emphasizing fallibility in my classroom. For the purpose of this essay, I will synthesize my experiences under the term fallible pedagogy, a perspective on instruction that respects human limits. Employing a fallible pedagogy allowed me to demonstrate the difference between power and violence by embodying an authority that, in Ricoeur’s definition of the term, “would propose to educate the individual to freedom.”6 Remaining aware of the transcendental, practical, and affective points of fallibility common to humans interrupts the implicit hierarchy caused when instructors assume/impose authority. It opens alternative classroom situations that empower students and teachers to learn from each other. It invites curricula and syllabi that embrace disproportion and human incompleteness, offering practical responses to these limit-situations. This approach assumes learning goals that cannot be quantified and will not be “mastered” by the end of the term. By refusing to fill the credibility gap that haunts situations of authority in many classrooms, a fallible pedagogy gently invites students to develop a critical awareness of ideological structures.7 The remainder of this chapter explores why a fallible pedagogy is central to teaching liberation, how I have introduced fallible perspectives to

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my students, ways I changed my grading, and why I this approach is helpful even beyond traditional institutional environments. 2. FALLIBILITY, INEQUALITY, AND EDUCATION A fallible pedagogy contributes to the process of inviting liberation. It is especially important as ideological factors amplify, rather than minimize, the disproportion at the heart of who we are. In Fallible Man, Ricoeur articulates how this disproportion accounts for human error rendering theories of “original sin” unnecessary. The disproportion originates in the human capability to view the infinite from a capacity grounded in finite givenness. Ricoeur provides three levels where the disproportion of the finite and infinite allow human error. First, at the transcendental level of knowing, humans orient toward the infinite potential of expression in language from a finite, limited perspective. Second, at the practical level of acting, humans orient toward the infinite possibilities of happiness from the finite predispositions of their character. Finally, at the affective level of feeling, humans wrestle between the infinite goods of intellectual happiness and the finite ends of vital pleasure. Ricoeur identifies each level’s point of synthesis: the imagination works at the transcendental level, the self works at the practical level, while the heart mediates the competing quests for pleasure and happiness. Importantly, this internal disproportion is not only the grounds of fallibility but also the necessary precondition of error. It also grounds the potential for liberation as it invites wonder and explains our capacity to enjoy experiences we can undergo but not understand. Paolo Freire assumes a philosophical anthropology similar to Ricoeur’s sense of disproportion as he writes of humans as uncompleted beings in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In it, Freire argues that our peculiar mode of incompletion allows us to develop, not just transform. Transformation occurs in seeds and animals that change in a “time which does not belong to them,” while development occurs within each individual’s “existential time.” Oppressed persons develop by becoming autonomous “beings-forthemselves,” opened to their ownmost infinite potentials.8 Transformation, in Ricoeur’s terms, would account for students’ maturing physical bodies, while development occurs in classrooms that liberate students to transform their capacity into capabilities. Development installs a sense of responsible self-authority within students. Students develop a self-empowered liberation by embracing their own fallible natures, becoming responsible toward them. This means neither taking responsibility for others (pushing them toward their infinite capability) nor attempting to dominate others (reducing them to their finite capacities).9

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Human fallibility comprises the developmental horizon where true liberation occurs. The structure of fallibility (our innate incompleteness) allows humans to engage in courageous self-affirmation through the passions Ricoeur identifies: having, power, and worth.10 When self-directed, the three passions of self-affirmation enable humans to continuously engage in their own liberation without appropriating the goods of others. Problematically, those who interpret finitude as lack, rather than gift, are tempted to repress the resulting anxiety and so project their finitude as a negation of others. This is domination: appropriating a corrupt version of authority by artificially augmenting the self against others through violence or threat. At best, this transformation of nearby life into heteronomous “beings-for-others” wins a temporary, illusory, illegitimate liberation from finitude. In classroom spaces, this often occurs when instructors assert an (infinite) mastery of material over their (finite, limited) students, eliminating questions that would undermine the instructor’s enhanced, corrupted authority. Protected through the work of ideology, manufactured hierarchies create the order of things everywhere, not just in educational institutions. Ideology is foundational to how humans interpret social reality. This is not accidental: as Ricoeur argues in his later writings, ideology “is animated by the will to show that the group that professes it is right to be what it is” so that “ideology is always more than a reflection, is always also a justification and project.”11 Thus, ideology “preserves, it conserves, in the sense of making firm the human order that could be shattered by natural or historical forces, by external or internal disturbances.”12 Ideology maintains an innocent authority at a primary level, where it exists as a social world’s continuing acquaintance with its past and projects for the future. Historically, ideology becomes corrupted when married to a second level of disproportion, the inequality caused by the domination of some groups over others. Protected from change by displacing its finite situatedness, ideology begins dictating social reality rather than reflecting it, generating an illusory infinitude. Dominant persons can then use ideology to justify their possession of power over others and the continuing repression and denial of their own fallibility—which is to say their own humanity.13 Only the kind of authority anchored in a second-order disproportion—authoritarianism—can be transferred like a possession or imposed over others, especially as this authority becomes synonymous with its monopoly on the use of violent force. Ideology legitimates and promotes the situation of second-order disproportion. A fallible pedagogy undermines systems of ideological inequality by equipping students to develop an authentic sense of authority. It emphasizes the importance of self-authorization anchored in responsibly moving from capacity to capability, accepting and developing finite conditions. Renouncing ideological authoritarianism, the teacher in this classroom instead possesses

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what Ricoeur describes as “an authority which would propose to educate the individual to freedom, which would be a power without violence.”14 Freire depicts this kind of authority as ingredient within organization, which provides a just distribution of authority and freedom, keeping them balanced.15 Freire argues that the oppressed are closer to an authentic form of freedom because they directly face the conditions of fallibility—unlike those whose authority-by-possession generates the illusion of escape. Teachers in this environment invite a student awareness that sees the situation of oppression as a sign of hope, rather than despair. As Freire writes, “hope is rooted in [human] incompletion . . . Hopelessness is . . . denying the world and fleeing from it.”16 A classroom that functions like an organization allows students to appreciate—and then develop—their innate limits. This foundational finitude is foregrounded in classroom spaces that do not recreate the artificially restricted world of inflated finitude generated by authoritarian power structures. These social conditions comprise what Freire calls “limit-situations,” which teachers introduce to students by way of themes.17 Freire’s emphasis is on the situation, because both oppressors and the oppressed are trapped within a culture that perpetuates the secondary level of disproportion framed by domination through ideology (and thus violence). Within this situation, the oppressed often face restrictions on their negative freedom that create obstacles to learning, exacerbated if students identify with these conditions and see themselves as incapable. Oppressors, however, face the problem of positive freedom that Greene described. By supplementing reality with ideology, oppressors lose sight of their humanity and inhabit an illusory space of infallibility. At the level of knowledge, the ability to brutally reinscribe a desired set of facts against reality makes oppressors invulnerable to error—and thus unable to learn. At a practical level, ideology’s universal dictates replace the particularities of character and substitute historical aims for the possibility of personal happiness, reducing (and alienating) the self to a generic form. As a result of this flight from reality, oppressors become ungrounded; thus, rather than experiencing an affective battle between finite and infinite varieties of pleasure, the oppressor knows only anxiety in its infinite (worries about maintaining a monopoly of power) rather than finite (death, food, and shelter) forms. Teachers often have both kinds of students within the same classroom space. Problematically, many classrooms—populated by teachers who lack an innate sense of authority and who thus borrow institutional/ideological support to supplement themselves—end up preserving rather than undermining systems of inequality. Such classrooms validate authoritarian rule, and in this way, the education system becomes a tool that supports the status quo. Freire refers to this model of education as the “banking” system, which should be familiar to those educated in the Global West:

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In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence.18

The “banking” system keeps students busy with “receiving, filing, and storing” the facts that teachers impose on students, which keeps students from developing the critical consciousness that emerges when intervening with the world in order to transform it. By emphasizing credulity instead of creativity, oppressors undermine a student’s capacity for creating change. This imposes limits on individual freedom and thus social flourishing.19 3. A FALLIBLE PEDAGOGY Unlike the banking model of education, a fallible pedagogy emphasizes the necessity for humans to engage in imperfect, communal inquiries that develop both critical and creative consciousness. It emphasizes the centrality of the imagination, the self, and the heart, where Ricoeur argues that we synthesize the disproportion we encounter at the levels of knowing, doing, and feeling. The imagination, self, and heart serve as the vehicles through which students move from capacity to capability within domains of knowing, doing, and feeling. For this reason, exploring fallibility at each level contributes toward a liberating education; after all, if this disproportion were not part of our core constitution, we would not have space to learn. Unlike the limit-situations which are artificially imposed over humans, which must be negated and overcome, our internal limits provide offer a secure foundation for an innate form of authority. A fallible pedagogy empowers students to find strength in honoring these vulnerable potentialities as the foundation of confident creative and critical thought. As Ricoeur notes, we interpret our finitude as evidence of fallenness in part because of long-standing cultural anxieties. Freire shows how authoritarians project fallibility onto those they oppress, presenting this fabricated situation as a predetermined destiny. Once entrenched as part of the status quo, repression and oppression cyclically recreate the circumstances resulting in “limitsituations” that become “natural.” A pedagogy devoted to freedom, one that fulfills the tasks of the educator discussed at the beginning of this chapter, liberates students from this situation. New communities of belonging, open to those who embrace fallibility, provide alternatives to oppressive situations. Teaching fallibility occurs at each of the three levels Ricoeur outlines:

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Knowing At the level of knowing, the imagination allows humans to understand situations as contingent, rather than necessary, and in this way opens the door to embracing the liberating potential of fallibility. The imagination provides permission to understand the self and the world in new ways. By activating the imagination in this way, educators accomplish the dialogical form of liberation, where “there are Subjects who meet to name the world in order to transform it” rather than “a Subject, who dominates by virtue of conquest.”20 Rather than fearing error and using violence to impose a definition of the world, the imagination allows the reconstruction of reality through a beautiful, communal process. Doing At the level of doing, the embrace of fallibility requires acknowledging the particularity of one’s point of view and sacrifices the appearance of a “universal” perspective. In our times, this would suggest finally eradicating the cultural belief that white men are the “neutral” position from which other perspectives deviate into error.21 This importantly invites the oppressed to see their specific cultural circumstances, which deviate from the oppressor’s culture, as worthy of celebration. Additionally, becoming relieved from occupying the abstract, universal banality of the assumed neutral enables those in positions of privilege to return to and take responsibility for the more limited subjectivity of their own lives—their personal bodies, histories, and perspectives. Using this finite perspective as a foundation personalizes the values that direct the meaning of “happiness.” A sense of self appears as a mediator that no longer conforms to the generic space marked out by an ideological trajectory, and this self is relieved of the need to employ violence to secure its space from others. This “self” is no longer threatened by difference; instead, the self is liberated to pursue its particular form of happiness. In concrete terms, this opens a new understanding of community mediated by respect for others with whom one shares the world. Feeling At the level of feeling, the embrace of fallibility provides an awareness of vulnerability and ways that the heart’s passion oscillates among competing kinds of goods. This, for Ricoeur, is the necessary space of human incompletion (“the Self is never certain: the triple quest in which it seeks itself [having, power, worth] is never completed”).22 Our affective lives are governed by a restlessness coextensive with the human experience.23 Violence erupts when this internal conflict is misinterpreted as a source of anxiety rather than

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vitality. Love is born when we experience the conflict as a source of delight, as a question to be explored. Freire points to this by defining love as dialogue.24 This correlates with Ricoeur’s discussion of passion, which refers to experiences beyond simple emotional extensions of vital feelings. Ricoeur writes, these are by no means complications of those fundamental “passions” that tradition has named love, hate, desire, hope, fear, boldness, timidity. A transcending intention dwells in them, and this can flow only from the infinite attraction of happiness. Only an object capable of adumbrating the whole of happiness can summon so much energy, lift man above his ordinary capacities and make him capable of sacrificing his pleasure while living painfully.25

A fallible pedagogy facilitates a dialogue anchored in love, a space beyond oppression, domination, or control. This creates a shared space of community, of belonging, of being-with that lacks the need for an overarching telos inasmuch as the community of students is, itself, liminal. Its only goal in coming into existence is to create the space in which the dialogue among those present might be had. A fallible pedagogy, like a pedagogy of the oppressed, works to empower people toward a capability that overcomes historically imposed limitsituations. Freire argues that when limitations obscure the general theme of an overarching situation (Domination, in our era), that people’s responses “can be neither authentically nor critically fulfilled,” which means they cannot transcend their situation. This keeps the oppressed separated from what Freire calls “an untested feasibility”26 that would contradict the limitation. The inability to consider alternatives (feasibility) constrains the imagination at the level of knowing, while it remains “untested,” at the level of doing: this self maintains a capacity thwarted from expression as a capability. By helping students understand the obstacles to their freedom, a fallible pedagogy opens new possibilities for the oppressed to find justice.27 Freedom arises when we are able to imagine “being more human,” wondering within our finite fallibility. Following Greene, our imagination of an alternative existence enables us to identify the specific obstacles (limit-situations) that constrain the self. This kind of limitation frustrates the heart, emphasizing pleasure and denying access to the goods that allow happiness.28 A fallible pedagogy serves the end of educating toward limit-situations by showing the true limits of humanity. On the one hand, this exposes the false limits imposed on humans by others served by these situations by revealing how mechanisms like misogyny, racism, poverty, addiction, classism, ageism, ableism, and other modes of social norming are repressive forces designed to maintain the status quo valorization of rich white heteronormative

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able-bodied men. On the other hand, it also shows the untested feasibility identified in the points of synthesis that Ricoeur locates within our innate disproportion. Education can then undertake exposing and then exploring the capacity of the imagination, the self, and the heart as horizons for true selfdevelopment. These comprise the limits we can lovingly embrace rather than need to overcome: it is by embracing these limits that we cross the frontier into being more human. 4. BEARING WITNESS AND A FALLIBLE PEDAGOGY Education changes the levels at which humans experience and negotiate the disproportions that lead to fallibility. A fallible pedagogy nurtures student confidence by respectfully exploring and engaging with the limit points that define humans—imagination, self, and heart. This not only directs students to the telos of personal education that marries knowledge and wisdom but also creates and sustains a vision for a just community that works to make it safe for its people to explore their limits through courageous, vulnerable inquiries. Problematically, educational systems often fail to orient to this goal of justice: their students are not empowered to understand their relative situations. In fact, critics of the American education system, from W. E. B. DuBois to bell hooks, disclose how its educational practices generally do the opposite.29 Education that emphasizes mastery and certainty leads to the erosion of exploration and a repression of fallibility. It engineers a system in which knowing how to recite facts becomes an end in itself, rather than a means toward learning questions or embodying wisdom. Administrative emphasis on student retention evolves into managed expectations and standardization, creating classrooms where teachers and learners perform anonymous roles without truly being engaged. Such environments, which often rely on technological stimulation, are infallible spaces of predictable learning acquisition whose results can be duplicated from one semester to the next.30 In contrast, a fallible pedagogy creates situations in which students can become aware of how their inner limits provide a true challenge. The work of education becomes accepting this challenge rather than avoiding it. Following Ricoeur’s framework of fallibility, empowerment emerges as the imagination allows language to enhance and inform sensory perception, as an expanded sense of moral happiness mediated through each individual’s sense of self becomes solidified as character, and as the vacillating heart becomes more proactive and confident in allowing a space for the uncertainty of love among others, in dialogue. The Just University seeks liberation through a fallible pedagogy that embraces the disproportion between the infinite and the finite and celebrates the fragile foundations of the human experience.

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Due to my interdisciplinary training, during two semesters as an adjunct instructor, I taught in four different academic departments (English, Philosophy, Religion, Rhetoric) at four different Midwestern colleges. I had the academic freedom to design courses that gave students tools necessary for understanding their limit-situations. My background in religion and literature allowed me to feel comfortable taking a philosophically rigorous approach to literary texts that were not deployed in a traditional “literature” classroom. I chose this approach and these texts because it provided students with firsthand, first-person accounts of working through the limits of fallibility. In this way, I could introduce my students to some of Ricoeur’s insights as lived out in practice, moving them through levels of fallibility at an implicit level. 31 The Disproportion of Knowing: David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” From the beginning sentences of his depiction of the Maine Lobster Fest, which emphasizes the invisible ways that marketing and sloganeering disguise the artificial as natural, this essay shows the strangeness of our intimacy with and alienation from the lobster.32 It provides a series of ways that we can “know” the lobster, from the historical to the scientific to the culinary. Each of these invite the reader to imagine the lobster from different human perspectives. Midway through the essay, DFW invites the reader to imagine the lobster from its perspective, based on information about its actions and its physiology. The words are ever apt and thus present the challenge of articulating sensations of its pain and pleasure. In this gap between the words, which attempt to illuminate the infinitude of sensation within our finite experience, the imagination becomes key. The essay’s challenges—to think through the pain of an alien being and to consider its implications—show modes of fallibility Ricoeur discusses (sensation and will). This essay opens into the task of imagining into the felt world of what is strange, relative to its finite experience, and into the task of imagining how the world could be otherwise than it is through changed action. It thus provides an enjoyable demonstration of what Ricoeur would deem the transcendental disproportion. The Disproportion of Doing: Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams” This essay discusses how the self is constructed as a way to negotiate one’s character (and the history of relationships and events that create it) and happiness (as the future end of one’s actions that evolves beyond pain).33 The author shows the finite limitations of character-based perspectives that she

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both portrays as an actor who grades medical students and as a woman who experiences serious medical procedures. Jamison depicts the hope for love and joy as motivations for actions—the quest for happiness. Most importantly, however, the question of the self as it emerges between one’s self and another (as well as the importance of empathy to this process) provides a rich, personal reflection that correlates with Ricoeur’s practical disproportion. The Disproportion of Feeling: Mary Gaitskill’s “On Not Being a Victim: Sex, Rape, and the Trouble with Following Rules” Gaitskill’s powerful essay looks at the internal disproportion that comes when not knowing how to ask the self questions about what goods are desired creates problems.34 Beginning with her reflecting on her troubling reaction to a complicated sexual encounter, the essay frames internal struggles and confusions about desired happiness. By directing readers to consider how language informs our understanding of the rules in differently problematic ways and thereby confuses our ability to determine our desire, the essay offers a gentle but incisive glimpse of the affective disproportion. Each of these essays invite students to think through the tasks Ricoeur set educators, especially in a classroom environment that features “collective responsibility” for discussing the text: they speak to the balance of conviction and responsibility, and also help to indicate the situatedness of particular cultural standpoints. Each essay also clearly communicates the capacity for humans to engage in active witness, demonstrating how critical and creative kinds of thinking combine. Freire argues that such witness “is one of the principal expressions of the cultural and educational character of the revolution,” describing its “historical, dialogical, and therefore dialectical” dimensions.35 Each essay also helps show students why witness requires awareness of one’s own standpoint. Thus, both the content and the mode of these essays provide all learners in the classroom with masterful demonstrations of becoming witnesses of human vulnerability, the powerful standpoint that undermines the anxieties that perpetuate avoidance through domination. Although I did not teach these essays specifically as modes of understanding fallibility, they nonetheless opened themselves to this kind of conversation in each of the courses/departments. Students found the essays both enjoyable and provocative, describing them as “life changing” in evaluations. In discussion, they could identify how the themes and challenges remained grounded in basic human experiences. Structurally, these essays share a capacity to point to our shared fragility, inviting students to feel confusion and conflict about what they read. Importantly, these also eliminate any presumption of authority: although there may be more-or-less-supported

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interpretations, the essays negate the possibility of mastery. This encourages a sense of equality that connects teachers and students, who are challenged to learn, together, ways of responsibly navigating through the crises of imagination, heart, and self. 5. AUTHORITY AND FALLIBLE PEDAGOGY The concerns anchored in our disproportion, which allows these points of synthesis to serve as sites for experiencing questions, often induce anxiety. Rather than responding through embracing fallibility, the oppressive structures that govern our world and that inform the educational structure in our current universities promote the values of certainty and mastery. From within this framework, justice appears in its transactional capacity—as economics. It therefore is not surprising that contemporary college and university classrooms have become spaces where economic tensions arise from a number of competing directions. Public and private educational institutions scramble to maintain funding from dwindling donor pools in order to remain competitive options for future students. Increased attention to the financial burden of student debt shows that college diplomas are important investment with life-changing consequences: in this context, a just classroom attends to a student’s need as consumer. The proliferation of adjunct professors and the erosion of tenure-track job security and health-care benefits for those who invested heavily in education means that those who are employed to teach need to satisfy both administrators and students. Administrators can fire instructors, instructors can fail students, and students can transfer: each group holds a different kind of authority. The economic stakes of education provide a complicating twist on the previous understanding of authority, in which the instructor—who was assumed to have amassed a mastery over the subject matter—had both institutional authority (the power to evaluate students) and educational authority (academic credentials). The current climate, with pressures to please (and thus pass) students, diminishes the importance of knowing the material and thus undermines institutional authority. The cumulative effect of this echoes Freire’s description of the urban oppressed, who live “in an expanding context in which the oppressive command center is plural and complex,” “subjected to an ‘oppressive impersonality,’” which, dispersed, is “to a certain extent ‘invisible.’”36 As a result, even well-intentioned instructors find themselves in the position that Freire ascribes to revolutionary leaders, who know they need the adherence of people. When leaders find that their people are characterized by “a certain aloofness and mistrust,” the tendency is to “regard this reaction as

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indicating an inherent defect on the part of the people” and thus to “interpret a certain historical moment of the people’s consciousness as evidence of their intrinsic deficiency.”37 Instructors today tend to face aloofness more than mistrust, especially as digital communication devices make it increasingly easy for students to be physically present, but wholly disengaged. Interpreting today’s students as “lazy,” “unprepared,” or “distracted” relative to earlier generations personalizes the problem. Blaming the issue on the abundance of technological devices and the instant gratification that it feeds implies a defect of character even as it names a peculiarity of modern times. Further, attempting to manage the classroom by banning certain devices is an imposition of authority more consistent with oppression than liberation—even if the instructor’s intended ends would benefit the students. The alternative available in the Just University is to engage in dialogue, through cooperation, and from a position that finds an affinity with students along the faultlines of human disproportion. Instructors lead from a position of fallibility, rather than mastery. Instructors refuse the consolation of external ideological arcs to cover credibility gaps and thereby demonstrate how supplemented authority leads to domination and oppression. Teaching authentically, freely, and fallibly empowers students to become collaborative dialogue partners. Rather than jockeying for power—or allowing a power vacuum—the instructor creates an empowering experience grounded in a critical and creative embrace of imagination, self, and heart. Instruction that adheres to predetermined slide shows (testifying to technology’s intrusion into industrial education) emphasizes abstracted information delivered without attention to context. This environment of abstraction, with artificially imposed demands and deadlines, emphasizes “correctness” and severs students from their capacity for curiosity, character, and care: such human attributes are irrelevant to this “learning” situation. Fortunately, we can imagine otherwise. As champions of fallibility, instructors no longer use authority to circumscribe the boundaries of their dialogue with students (domination); instead, focusing on imagination, self, and heart provides compassion for experiencing the wonder of exploration, the possibility of change, and the importance of ambiguity (liberation). 6. FALLIBLE PEDAGOGY AND EVALUATION Evaluating students remains an obstacle to creating this ideal classroom environment. The perpetuation of privilege and claims of entitlement push students to focus on what grade they “deserve” instead of on the process of learning. Nonetheless, current social factors justify student anxieties and claims to grades they are “due.” Alternative evaluation processes become

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difficult to balance within larger structures based on oppressive reductionism. This external context around grading makes it difficult for instructors to avoid performative contradictions that arise when exercising authority over a mastery of content. While teaching, I developed a two-hour final examination that was open note, open book, and consisted of ten multiple choice questions featuring four answers, with a maximum of five points possible per question. I would send the students the questions (but not the answers) a few days before the test so that they could prepare. Students often described this form as a difficult but fair form of testing. The trick: each answer is potentially correct. To answer a question requires that students accomplish the following tasks (worth one point each): 1: Define the question 2: Argue why one answer fits the definition 3: Argue why each other answer does not fit (three points possible). The major course themes discussed throughout the semester became questions. Answer choices included characters, authors, or situations from the reading. Students were neither penalized nor credited for ignoring potential answers, making weak arguments, nor for inconsistent answers (e.g., if the logic arguing for answer B was also valid for D, I gave credit for B, but not D). This format invites students to integrate creative and critical thinking skills. They experience how truth can lead to equally valid outcomes based on how a few key terms are defined, and feel empowered to choose their best answer out of the options provided. Unlike a pure short answer or essay test, providing four answers creates a limited framework that contextualizes the question in a specific way. Each of the tasks—defining the question, arguing for an answer, arguing against the others—allows students to use critical thinking not only to articulate distinctions but also to creatively explore how the questions and answers are true for them. The test validates each student’s singular synthesis of class content, welcoming their unique viewpoints. They are rewarded for answering with imagination, self, and heart. Students practiced this format in a series of pop quizzes throughout the semester. A one-question quiz took around twenty-five minutes—ten to fifteen minutes to let students answer on their own, and ten to fifteen to discuss which definitions would justify different answers. Students thus heard a variety of answers and opinions, experiencing knowledge as collective exploration rather than moment of solitary mastery. Although some answers were better than others (critical thinking), there was no single “correct” way

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to argue (creative thinking). Unlike the final (which integrated choices from throughout the semester), quizzes were anchored in a single day’s reading. As an example, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ masterful Between the World and Me bears witness to how different presentations of race, gender, and culture in America cause different kinds of experience. The book is framed as a letter to Coates’ son, describing the perils of living in an America dominated by whiteness. Coates demonstrates both how schools participate in the larger framework of oppression and how education paves the way to liberation. Throughout, Coates describes how American racism alters his physical bearing—clarified when he visits a very different French culture.38 Depending on a class’s themes and objectives, this could serve as a quiz question: 1. Which of the following is the most significant influence in how Coates understands his body given an American context that emphasizes whiteness? A: The way that he imagines the experience of an enslaved woman (p. 69) B: The death of his friend Prince Carmen Jones (p. 77) C: His concern for the potential body of his son (p. 71) D: His experience of different forms of blackness at college (p. 41) Because each answer is arguable, students could choose to base what is “most significant as an influence” on how Coates clarifies his embodied experience or on how America understands whiteness. Each answer invites imagination (reconstructed experience), self (identification with difference), or heart (care and concern). Put otherwise, students need to imagine Coates’ perspective to understand how a self would move from a character anchored in a racist society toward a vision of happiness, and feel how an embodied heart would vacillate between fear and love in this context. Because the choices look at an imagined past, an experienced past, an imagined present, and an imagined future—grounded in different embodied experiences—each suggests different kinds of influence that students can recognize within themselves, name, and understand. Better answers might include: • The most significant influence is quantitative, one that defines a cultural situation. The most significant influence on Coates is therefore A, because the experiences of enslaved women are part of what testifies to racism overall. • The most significant influence surprises us in a present moment and shocks us into a new realization. B is most significant because it was unexpected

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and helped Coates to realize the fragility of his body in a concrete, specific way. • The most significant influence is qualitative, one that affects how we understand the future. The most significant influence is therefore C, his concern for the future well-being of his son. • The most significant influence sparks curiosity instead of dread. The most significant influence is D, because the different kinds of blackness expanded his feeling empowered by being outside of the Dream. I did not always offer page numbers, but giving more information allowed students to focus on higher-level critical and creative thinking skills, not recollection. I would give a half point when answers argued how an option was significant (they all are), but not most. This represents the kind of question I would put on the final examination: 1: Which author best explores how the imagination, the self, and the heart illustrate fallibility along the lines of Ricoeur’s definition? A: David Foster Wallace B: Leslie Jamison C: Mary Gaitskill D: Ta-Nehisi Coates This invites students to explicitly define what constitutes “best explores” and to comprehend how each work’s focus (lobster, body, obedience, and violence) generates a different demonstration. “Best” could also be defined by the work’s tone (comic or tragic), by length, or by defining “fallibility.” Students could easily gauge their scores, even without a single “right” choice. Providing questions beforehand allowed students to consider different responses, depending on possible answer choices—in studying, students empowered themselves by reviewing the semester’s themes in an expansive way. 7. THE FUTURE OF A FALLIBLE PEDAGOGY A fallible pedagogy equips students to embrace and explore the limits of their lives. It allows rather than overwhelms. It empowers. It is a means to an end and an end in itself. Classrooms that emphasize fallibility invite students to conceive of liberation as the act of embodying the uncertainty within imagination, self, and heart toward an autonomous experience. Ideally, this work of liberating individuation occurs within a supportive communal context that nourishes human wholeness. Classrooms that encourage being with others, confidently fallible, fulfills Ricoeur’s tasks for teachers.39

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Part of the joy of education emerges when a class helps create the souls that inspire and guide worlds. A fallible pedagogy equips people to become this kind of teacher beyond the classroom. One example of this kind of teacher, bell hooks, discusses how her personal evolution reflects a greater sense of transformative revolution. In her Teaching Community, hooks describes her transition away from the “corporate university classroom . . . teaching in a degree-centered context” that meant that despite her “criticism of the banking model of education,” she had “unwittingly been seduced by the notion of the set classroom time as the most useful vehicle to teach and learn.”40 This corresponded with a larger pattern that hooks had identified: As an intellectual working as an academic I often felt that my commitment to radical openness and devotion to critical thinking, to seeking after truth, was at odds with the demands that I uphold the status quo if I wanted to be rewarded.41

As an alternative, hooks defines democratic education as hoping to “re-envision schooling as always part of our real world experience” by understanding that “teaching and learning take place constantly” such that learning becomes “an experience that riches life in its entirety.”42 Within institutional, traditional classroom spaces, hooks argues that it is crucial to forge “a learning community that values wholeness over division, disassociation, splitting” and therefore that the “democratic educator works to creates closeness” through a shared passion for knowledge. As an example, hooks discusses forging communal bonds “across race, gender, class” and religion to become anchored through an identity with those who “wanted to choose an intellectual life, who . . . valued learning as an end in itself and not as a means to . . . class mobility, power, status.”43 In this way, hooks opens how the Just University remains focused on the world beyond the classroom as vastly more important than the experiences engineered within it. The relevance of hooks’ model was reinforced during the coronavirus crisis of 2020, which, at this time of writing, had caused universities throughout the world to shutter their doors. Classrooms, dormitories, and stadiums are empty. The crisis not only demonstrated why pedagogies that promote liberation often stray beyond officially sanctioned classroom spaces but also highlighted the limit-situations surrounding our culture. The failure of authority to act responsibly to safeguard the population, the instant threat to survival experienced by the housing insecure without savings for rent, the loss of jobs that translated (in America) to a loss of health care, the lack of universal health care that exacerbated the crisis: each factor indicated the scope of the problem America faced. Teaching for fallibility during this time empowered students to apply knowing, doing, and feeling in ways that allowed each

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student to feel capable of living through this time toward a time when some of the systemic injustices—fractured during the crisis—would be repaired. At the time of writing, long-term implications of spring 2020 remain unknown. A classroom devoted to a fallible pedagogy is important in how it anchors the experience and expression of a new kind of community—a new world that is neither anchored in the present ideology nor in a futural utopia, but one that appears and names itself as it occurs. Teachers can use the precepts of a fallible pedagogy by modeling how to lead from an authority based in liberation rather than power, teaching content that explores fallibility rather than mastery, evaluating students through their willingness to combine critical and creative thought, and by creating a space of closeness that stands opposed to the solitary, fractured world of oppression. By remaining aware of the importance of a world that provides a larger context for living fallibly, educators provide a structured, supported glimpse of how to live toward imagination, self, and heart as ever-present limit tasks that deepen our commitment to critical and creative interdependence in an empowering, nondomineering form of temporary community. A fallible pedagogy thus provides an important contribution to the Just University. NOTES 1. Paul Ricoeur, “The Tasks of the Political Educator,” in Political and Social Essays by Paul Ricoeur, ed. David Steward and Joseph Bien (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974), 286–287. 2. Ricoeur, “Tasks of the Political Educator,” 287–291. 3. Ricoeur, “Tasks of the Political Educator,” 293. 4. Maxine Greene, Dialectics of Freedom (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1988), 5. 5. Ricoeur’s depiction of the four-component human possibilities—I can speak, I can do things, I can tell a story, and I can be imputed—are possibilities that become important in an ethical community. Understanding “name” as “identify,” Greene’s analysis of freedom thus can be seen as more basic than Ricoeur’s capabilities as they do not necessarily even require language. See Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response,” in John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall, eds., Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought (New York: Routledge, 2002), 280. 6. Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 120. 7. Paul Ricoeur, “Ideology and Utopia” in From Text To Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 315. 8. Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1995), 142. 9. I will choose to focus on the dynamics of domination throughout this essay, but the twinned problem of taking responsibility for others is also important for teachers

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to understand. Teachers and others motivated by socially prominent but deeply problematic conceptions of care, interpret finitude as a problem to fix for another. This often entails attempting to take responsibility for student development. No matter how generously intended, taking responsibility for/from others anchors recipients in their finitude. It results in making them dependent and lacking in self-authority, with less trauma but more confusion than what results from the dynamics of domination. 10. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 106–125. 11. Paul Ricoeur, “Science and Ideology,” in From Text To Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 250, emphasis original. 12. Ricoeur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 318. 13. Ricoeur, “Ideology and Utopia,” 315. 14. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 120 15. Freire, Pedagogy, 159–160: “Authority can avoid conflict with freedom only if it is ‘freedom-become-authority.’ Hypertrophy of the one provokes atrophy of the other. Just as authority cannot exist without freedom, and vice versa, authoritarianism cannot exist without denying freedom, nor license without denying authority. In the theory of dialogical action, organization requires authority, so it cannot be authoritarian; it requires freedom, so it cannot be licentious. Organization is, rather, a highly educational process in which leaders and people together experience true authority and freedom, which they then seek to establish in society by transforming the reality which mediates them.” 16. Freire, Pedagogy, 72. 17. Consistent with the analysis offered above, Freire identifies our current era’s theme as domination “which implies its opposite, the theme of liberation, as the objective to be achieved. . . . In order to achieve humanization, which presupposes the elimination of dehumanizing oppression, it is absolutely necessary to surmount the limit-situations in which people are reduced to things” (Freire, Pedagogy, 84). 18. Freire, Pedagogy, 53. 19. Freire, Pedagogy, 50–55. 20. Freire, Pedagogy, 148. 21. A number of books over the past fifty years have elaborated on the empty “universal” associated with Cartesian mastery. Two recent works—Necropolitics and Epistemologies of the South—provide challenges to Western domination and compelling alternatives for the importance of Africa and the Global South as decentering (and nonuniversalizing) reason. Gilligan and Snider’s Why Does the Patriarchy Persist? analyzes the problems with the gendered assumptions behind this universalist, decontextualized approach. See Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2017); Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (Boston: Polity, 2018). 22. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 126 23. Ricoeur, 132: “conflict is a function of man’s most primordial constitution; the object is synthesis; the self is conflict.”

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24. Freire, Pedagogy, 70: “Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself. It is thus necessarily the task of responsible Subjects and cannot exist in a relation of domination . . . Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others.” 25. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 129. 26. Freire, Pedagogy, 83. 27. See Freire, Pedagogy, 83, where Freire offers a succinct depiction of this process: “In sum, limit situations imply the existence of persons who are directly or indirectly served by these situations, and of those who are negated and curbed by them. Once the latter come to perceive these situations as the frontier between being and being more human, rather than the frontier between being and nothingness, they begin to direct their increasingly critical actions toward achieving the untested feasibility implicit in that perception. On the other hand, those who are served by the present limit-situation regard the untested feasibility as a threatening limit-situation which must not be allowed to materialize, and act to maintain the status quo.” 28. See Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 118–119. Here, Mbembe discusses that colonialism spread as the colonizers mediated the process through “goods” that spawned the “frantic pursuit of desire and enjoyment—a desire free from responsibility and the pursuit of enjoyment as a mentality.” The resulting cult of the master required a commitment to “a pedagogy aimed at inculcating the vices of venality, vanity, and cupidity,” consistent with “the secret of the colony . . . the subjection of the native by way of desire” (emphasis original). The current values within the contemporary American education system seem more consistent with the logic dominating colonies than ones attuned to liberation. 29. See Greene, Dialectics, 22. Here, Greene indicates how the American way of understanding freedom as a lack of restriction has made us a “passive, consuming audience,” and while some seek shelter in their “interior lives” and others use privilege to strive for “success,” these views are “antithetical to freedom.” These are problematic because they “alienate persons from their own landscapes” and “impose a fallacious completeness on what is perceived.” 30. Freire, Pedagogy, 81. 31. Greene also surveys the particular cultural and social situations of women (chapter 3) nonwhite persons (chapter 4) in her book. She ends with a call to art, saying that “the arts will help open the situations that require interpretation, will help disrupt the walls that obscure the spaces, the spheres of freedom to which educators might some day attend” (Greene, Dialectics, 113). 32. David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (London: Abacus, 2013). 33. Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays (London: Granta, 2014). 34. Mary Gaitskill, “On Not Being a Victim: Sex, Rape, and the Trouble with Following Rules,” Harper’s, March 1994, 35–44. 35. Freire, Pedagogy, 157. 36. Freire, Pedagogy, 156. 37. Freire, Pedagogy, 146.

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38. I also assigned Cornel West’s critique of Coates’s neoliberalism as part of our conversation during the last day of class, demonstrating the importance of standpoint in assessing truth. See Cornel West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle,” The Guardian online, Dec. 17, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​ /co​​mment​​isfre​​e​/201​​7​/dec​​/17​/t​​a​-neh​​isi​-c​​oates​​-neol​​ibera​​l​-bla​​c​k​-st​​ruggl​​e​-cor​​nel​-w​​est. 39. It also restores a long-standing deficit in American education. W. E. B. DuBois understood the importance of education, a major theme of his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. In it, DuBois opposes Booker T. Washington’s 1895 “Atlanta Compromise,” which accepted funding for Black educational charities from Northern whites with the provision that they no longer advocate for equality, integration, or justice. DuBois felt education that excluded freedom would eliminate the purpose of education; moreover, doing so would impoverish the world. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 2018). 40. bell hooks, Teaching Community (Dev Publishers, 2018), 21. 41. hooks, Teaching Community, 22. 42. hooks, Teaching Community, 41–42. 43. hooks, Teaching Community, 49.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin, 2018. Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1995. Gaitskill, Mary. “On Not Being a Victim: Sex, Rape, and the Trouble with Following Rules.” Harper’s, March 1994. Gilligan, Carol, and Naomi Snider. Why Does Patriarchy Persist? Boston: Polity, 2018. Greene, Maxine. Dialectics of Freedom. New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1988. hooks, bell. Teaching Community. Dev Publishers, 2018. Jamison, Leslie. The Empathy Exams: Essays. London: Granta, 2014. Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. ———. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Ricoeur, Paul. “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response.” In Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. Edited by John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall. New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. Fallible Man. New York: Fordham University Press, 1986. ———. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, ed. James M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. ———. “Ideology and Utopia.” In From Text To Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, ed. James M. Edie, 308–324. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. ———. Political and Social Essays by Paul Ricoeur. Edited by David Steward and Joseph Bien. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974. ———. “Science and Ideology.” In From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, ed. James M. Edie, 246–249. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991.

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———. “The Tasks of the Political Educator,” In Political and Social Essays by Paul Ricoeur. Edited by David Steward and Joseph Bien, 271–293. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2017. Wall, John, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall, eds. Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. New York: Routledge, 2002. Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. London: Abacus, 2013. West, Cornel. “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle.” The Guardian online, Dec. 17, 2017. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/co​​ mment​​isfre​​e​/201​​7​/dec​​/17​/t​​a​-neh​​isi​-c​​oates​​-neol​​ibera​​l​-bla​​ck​​-st​​ruggl​​e​-cor​​nel​-w​​est.

Chapter 6

Oneself as Another and The Argonauts An Attempt at Interpretive Justice Richard A. Rosengarten

INTRODUCTION: RICOEUR AND THE “JUST UNIVERSITY” At the conclusion of the three volumes of Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur noted—true to form—that further work beckoned. His investigation of modern narrative’s representation of temporality through the genres of history and fiction had raised a new set of questions under the category of “narrative identity”: “Who is speaking?” “Who is acting?” “Who is recounting about herself?” “Who is the imputed moral subject?” True to his invocation of the public square at the conclusion of Time and Narrative, these are, for Ricoeur, foundational questions of ethics and of action. The matter of identity will inevitably involve postulations of the good and the obligatory. Narrative leads us to ethics.1 This is the widely recognized program of Ricoeur’s final major work, Oneself as Another.2 The premise from which Ricoeur addresses these questions is that while the answer to the questions listed above is taken axiomatically to be “the self,” any version of that answer—whether Descartes’s or Nietzsche’s—is in fact inadequate because to say “the self” is not the same as to say “I.” This is for Ricoeur at root a matter of grammar: to say “self” implies reflexivity, whereas to say “I” is to posit an object. In linguistic practice, the two terms present a dialectic that is prerequisite to answering any question that begins, “Who?” This dialectic spawns, for Ricoeur, two elaborations that inform his ensuing considerations of “Who” questions regarding language, action, identity, and ethics: the dialectic of idem and ipse, and the crowning articulation—the dialectic of self and other. While made the object of explicit consideration in Oneself as Another, justice is a perennial consideration in Ricoeur’s work. The human person is 121

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stipulated as an agent, responsible for her actions. Yet for Ricoeur, the agent is not transparent to herself, but mediated. The rough-and-ready sorting of Ricoeur’s ouevre into conjoint but distinct operations of phenomenology and hermeneutics is partially smoothed by this recognition: the usual (and helpful) formulation is that a transparent discussion of the phenomena of selfhood inevitably encounters this disjunction, and must turn to hermeneutics to identify and to explain the forms through which selfhood achieves perception. This may be perfectly true, but what does it all have to do with “the just university”? Why should we attend to these particular premises, however enduring, of Ricoeur’s work? How might the intellectual program of Oneself as Another, at least as here described, help us to think about the character of “the just university”? Let me first acknowledge that, for many, the connection between the work of a recondite philosopher and the pragmatics of institutional justice are not intuitive. What follows will not make it so. As is the case with any complex institutions, “justice” has many dimensions in the context of “the university.” A brief and incomplete list would have to include appropriate uses of endowments; fair wages and benefits for all employees, including staff and adjunct faculty; and relations with the wider community in which the university situates itself. What makes Ricoeur, and especially Oneself as Another, pertinent to “the just university” is that it underscores what the essay posits to be the core claim to “justice” that the university must pursue, and without which all the other absolutely crucial considerations listed above (and all those unlisted) will be without real meaning: the teaching of critical thought, or the weighing evidence and argument in the service of the true, the good, and the beautiful. No university can be truly just without seeking achievement in this specific endeavor, and its measure as just must ultimately be taken with reference to its level of achievement in that regard. Ricoeur is exemplary, I shall argue, of the powers and the limits of critical thinking. In his terms, critical thought was encompassed by what he termed as a hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval. Suspicion consists in asking questions about our intellectual heritage, focused especially on what he characterized as aporia, or gaps in systems of thought. It was important to Ricoeur that this was pursued with probity and charity, giving due allowances both for the fallibilities of the reader and also for the possibility that the perceived gaps were not necessarily in the system itself, but in a later rendition that in some way misconstrued it. But critical thought obliges us to ask about the truth of our inheritance, and to identify what in that inheritance was inconsistent to itself, or is belied by the circumstances in which we live. Ricoeur identified Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the great masters of the hermeneutics of suspicion.

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Retrieval—perhaps the less intuitive dimension of Ricoeur’s critical thought—consists in reformulating the heritage in a way that adopts what is found to be coherent and useful to address present circumstances. Many readers of Ricoeur have, in my view mistakenly, construed retrieval to consist in the recovery or reinstatement of the heritage, whether that be a matter of a specifically religious faith or of trust in a received intellectual or political tradition. Ricoeur thought rather that retrieval meant the creation of something new: something that participated at once in the heritage and in the present moment. Put differently, critical thought has for Ricoeur both historical and constructive dimensions. It cares very much about what has been thought and said, but its task is incomplete if it is satisfied with the elucidation of the past. Critical thought recognizes that the past is not the present, and that to think critically is to think not what the past thought, but what the present should think. The degree to which Ricoeur’s work fully succeeds in this admittedly challenging task is an open question. What is clear to any reader of Ricoeur is that his writing is simply too restless—too relentlessly dialogical—to privilege either the elucidation of the past or the construal of the present. What Ricoeur offers is a model of thought in which suspicion and retrieval constantly interact—at times, almost maddeningly so. But Ricoeur was not deterred, because he was convinced that only this constant interaction could render the fullest justice to the complex, ongoing relation of knowledge to life. In this respect, I argue, Paul Ricoeur was himself a microcosm of the just university: he occupied a place of knowledge and was devoted not merely to its perpetuation, but to its increasing refinement and clarification with direct reference to enhancing life. In theory and in practice, this is his version of justice, and his articulation of what it might mean, at its core, for a university to be just. Ricoeur’s practice of critical thought fostered dialogues between forms or systems of thought that, while asking the same or very similar questions, did so from different assumptions and via different methods. This essay aims to follow this practice, via an engagement probably not dreamed of, but which is I hope to show by no means inimical to Ricoeur’s own philosophy. It will create a conversation between Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015)3 and Oneself as Another (1992). In brief, I will ask Nelson’s work, written “in drag as a memoirist,”4 to engage Ricoeur’s formulation of his “little ethic” as “aiming at a good life with and for others in just institutions.”5 Nelson is, in my judgment, equally concerned with doing justice—phenomenologically and hermeneutically—to her experience, and she is keenly aware, even as she writes it, of the nontransparency of the locution “I.” My essay’s ultimate goal is to explore whether Ricoeur’s insistence that the self is not transparent to itself engages what Nelson means by “queerness,” or, conversely, whether

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“queerness” affords address to the idea that “I” is in some way “other” to itself. This juxtaposition may seem counterintuitive, for good reasons. Ricoeur strives for a classically “disinterested” philosophical voice, and his writing pays at best scant attention to sexuality (his own or others). Nelson harbors deep suspicion of any purportedly “disinterested” articulation, and her writing affords overt and ongoing attention to sexuality (her own and others). Ricoeur’s engagement of structuralism looks back to past thinkers (Kant and Hegel). Nelson’s engagement of structuralism looks forward to its future revisionists (Sedgwick and Butler). Ricoeur writes expositionally and posits an intrinsic relation of a text’s form to its thought. Nelson writes with abundant personal reference and posits an intrinsic (if, in the end, partial) disjunction of language to reality. Yet some striking conjunctions also exist. Each is an obsessively citational writer who overtly engages and at moments even stylistically imitates her or his canon. Each balances appreciation of and dissatisfaction with so-called “analytic” philosophy after Wittgenstein. Each explicitly offers “an interpretation of our circumstances.”6 And each draws upon a Western “classic” (Augustine’s distentio animi for Ricoeur, the legend of the Argonauts for Nelson) to characterize the modern dilemma of relating language to morality. Each also pursues their specific project in a way that makes it impossible to avoid sustained reference to religion. In some sense, they are united in finding a religion beyond religion and see in that formulation a way to recognize the path toward justice—in one’s life and, by extension, in institutions such as the university.7 The brunt of what follows focuses on The Argonauts, offering what it seems to me that a Ricoeurian reading would highlight. As such it is informed by Ricoeur’s exemplary reading of Augustine’s Confessions, which I take to be Ricoeur’s most extended foray into the concept of “narrative identity” that informs Oneself as Another. In brief, Ricoeur replicates in his exegesis what he takes to be the fundamental character of Augustine’s narrative identity: his distentio animi, or distended/wandering soul.8 I take the fundamental character of Nelson’s narrative identity in The Argonauts to be the establishment of what she means by “queerness.” This may be its own kind of distentio. I shall at least imply that this is the case, but I will resist asserting it, for two reasons. First, in the fashion of Ricoeurian critical thought, the initial statement of one’s goal does not preclude one’s need to argue for it. And, second, the resistance reflects the claim, also in my view Ricoeurian, that “retrieval” does not mean “assimilation.” It is as important to the essay’s aim to consider the ways in which we might think of Augustine as Nelsonian, as to consider Nelson an Augustinian. Phrased explicitly in the terms of this volume: absent consideration of Nelson’s The Argonauts, Ricoeur’s “little ethic” would be incomplete to

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any conception of “the just university” in our twenty-first-century context. I believe Ricoeur’s approach not only allows but also mandates such an intervention. Nelson’s idea of Argo-love, with its sense of flux and needed iteration, brings into fuller relief than Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another how his thought is continually animated by performative and descriptive acts of interpretation. Bringing Nelson’s recent work into conversation with Ricoeur seeks then to exemplify the kind of activity of suspicion and retrieval that the just university should and can sponsor. Reading Nelson at once introduces a suspicion of Ricoeur, and it also enables, I argue, his retrieval in a future that he did not anticipate. In short, and perhaps counterintuitively: Nelson can, even should be read as taking up Ricoeur’s argument, and making it better. 1. THE ARGONAUTS I: SUSPICION— THE SHAPE-SHIFTING LANGUAGE FOR SELVES AND THEIR OTHERS Nelson’s title invokes the Greek mythological tale of the heroes who accompanied Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece. Her text explicitly references the myth immediately via quotation of Roland Barthes: I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”9

This passage announces an ongoing debate Nelson will have with her partner, Harry Dodge, regarding the promises and pitfalls of language. Written entirely in the first-person singular, The Argonauts addresses a “you” who at this early moment is not denominated, but whom the reader will come to know as her text’s dedicatee, “Harry.” The “you” is also, secondarily but at times more explicitly and at others implicitly or not at all, the reader of Nelson’s text. Each reflects the author’s straightforward awareness that the person she loves—a claim made manifest on every page of The Argonauts—is a “who” experienced, in thought and in action, as both a “self” and an “other.” Nelson’s narrative tells the reader all of this through snippets of conversational exchange, anecdotal observation, and most enduringly in its recursive return to Harry’s process of transition. These returns to and exchanges with Harry function like the Chorus in a Greek tragedy to emphasize the myriad

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ways that the ambiguity of the language of identity extends to the language of action. Harry and the narrator marry in California, becoming a couple who aspire to a paradigm of domestic happiness without institutionalizing its social norms (heteronormative or otherwise). Family life is the institution to which they aspire, without adopting the conventional roles assigned to patriarch and matriarch. Parallel to Harry’s process of transition is Nelson’s transition into motherhood, initially as de facto stepmother to Harry’s son and then through her pregnancy, labor, and birthing of the couple’s son Iggy. Per Barthes’ formulation, Nelson’s text underscores the ways that to love someone requires recognition—optimally, celebration—that the statement “I love you” appropriately takes countless forms because it is always at once a renewal of an ongoing commitment that is the same, and a statement that means anew in inevitably changed circumstances.10 Harry’s transition is a superb metonym for the renewal of wedding vows, which do not—indeed, cannot—replicate the original sacramental exchange, yet can and do confirm its meaning in new, and sometimes, perplexing or difficult or uncertain circumstances. That Nelson includes in her text Harry’s misgivings about the way he is represented only serves to underscore the Ricoeurian dialectic. Harry, too, is an other to the self that is Harry: something Nelson is overtly attuned to in terms of gender but—from Harry’s perspective as rendered by Nelson—not so much in Ricoeur’s terms of the self that is other to itself. Harry worries that Nelson will not, cannot, justly represent Harry’s experience of transition. For Harry, it is what Ricoeur would term a hermeneutical problem: Nelson lacks the cultural resources to do justice to Harry’s process of transition, all the more keenly so given the dependence of such resources on language. The obdurate distance between Harry and Nelson is in part limned by their opposed perspectives on language, announced also from the opening pages. Harry is persuaded “that words are not good enough. Not only not good enough, but corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow.”11 Doing things with words—Nelson’s own work—is inimical to Harry. The Argonauts is Nelson’s attempt to remain true to her work while also being true to Harry and, in turn, true to their love and their emergent domesticity. She seeks to speak what the world would deem unspeakable. Nelson’s recourse to the myth of the Argonauts is meant, in her subsequent articulation of “Argo-love,” to address Harry’s conundrum directly. The allusion and its development parallels Ricoeur’s recourse, in Time and Narrative, to Augustine’s Confessions to redress modernity’s resistance to speak fully of temporality and, especially, to elaborate its claim for the finality of death. Nelson and Ricoeur are an oddly matched but unmistakable couple on this point: each would, indeed must, write about what has been declared to be beyond words. Each cites an earlier text that forces the reader to consider the

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conundrum as at once of its moment yet also transcendent of it—relentlessly specific yet, despite that crucial specificity, perennial. Enter again Nelson’s title, not now in Barthes’ own elaboration, but in Nelson’s subsequent invocations. Elaborating on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s idea of “queerness” as holding “all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation,” Nelson links the term with “a nominative, like Argo, willing to designate molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip.”12 Rendering Barthes’s evocation carnal (while also seeking to honor Sedgwick by acknowledging the explicitly unspeakable yet suggesting its expanding parameters), Nelson later writes of her sexual relationship with Harry as “more than a perfect match, as that implies a kind of stasis. Whereas we’re always moving, shape-shifting. No matter what we do, it always feels dirty without feeling lousy.” And in her coda to the same paragraph: “the words I eventually found may have been Argo, but now I know: there’s no substitute for saying them with one’s own mouth.”13 These later invocations limn how Nelson negotiates the difference between herself and her lover with regard to language: she names the use of the classical theme as a kind of compromise and reinvokes it; at the same time, she names the inferiority of words on a page to words in one’s mouth. Nelson extends Barthes’ analogy: the relationship she has with Harry makes them heroic travelers on a ship that is both constant and constantly reconstructed, their Golden Fleece its own kind of restoration of what is meant to be yet has been denied arbitrarily. The text is necessary yet ancillary, mythical and/or scriptural in its capacity to be at once microscopic and telescopic.14 Nelson here offers what is not thought, or at least not acknowledged, in Ricoeur’s philosophy: an erotics of signification, in which the capacities to perform and to discern, to say and to vocalize, prove essential to all just relations. The Argonauts is its own kind of manual of which the relationship of recognizably, necessarily carnal love to social justice is integral: self-understanding and other-understanding are inextricable and emerge as the Golden Fleece of their relationship and, in turn, of their institutional existence as a family in society. In strikingly Ricoeurian fashion, while Nelson’s formulation affords surcease to Harry’s objections, her uneasiness with signification perdures throughout The Argonauts. Later in the text she remarks in exasperation that “I don’t want to represent anything,”15 and while this is immediately a dig at certain proclivities of poststructuralism (Badiou, Zizek, Silverman), it is also an ongoing acknowledgment that words on the page can only partially substitute for their actual utterance. Nelson’s attraction to Judith Butler’s thought is its potential to mediate this innate tension. Butler provides Nelson with a language for otherness that acknowledges writing as a performance in which, as

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Nelson notes, “we are for another or by virtue of another.”16 Nelson reiterates this phrasing just prior to the above-cited passage expressing her resistance to representation: she speaks again of “performing a self for others,” and doing so “for another, by virtue of another.”17 Nelson’s turn to Butler is also her own turn to ethics. Unlike Ricoeur, the locution of whose “little ethic” is “we are for another,” Nelson’s ethic pivots on the statement that “we perform for another.” This is the heart of Nelson’s commitment to the ontology of queerness: there can be no action for another absent some form of performance. At precisely this point, Nelson would exercise Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of suspicion toward Ricoeur himself: it is, Nelson would argue, the binary systems of thought that make the life she seeks with Harry so difficult to realize: each seeks to “act for another” yet encounters conundra and outright resistance. This is precisely because, in Nelson’s view, it is idle to assume that to “act for another” is not inevitably a “performance for another.” This is for Nelson a matter of just characterization, and precisely why Butler becomes so integral to her argument. An index of the nuance of this corrective is that Nelson has an accompanying “hermeneutic of retrieval” in which the introduction of the performative does not result in a simple affirmation of the perils of “heteronormativity.” Nelson’s ongoing restiveness with language extends beyond the performativity of her relationship to Harry. While their efforts at what she calls “genderqueer family making”18 are the backbone of the narrative, Nelson performs a narrative voice that seeks a kind of equipoise of ongoing acknowledgment and working (through language) with various disjunctions of “self” and “other.” As befits her narrative practice, some get extended play while others are briefly invoked. In the former category, there is the Snapfish mug given to Nelson by her mother on which is reproduced a Christmas photograph of Harry, a pregnant Nelson, and their son dressed to attend a production of the Nutcracker. “Wow, my friend said, filling it up. I’ve never seen anything so heteronormative in all my life.”19 Nelson captures the moment and comments extensively. First, but what about it is the essence of heteronormativity? That my mother made a mug on a boojie service like Snapfish? That we’re clearly participating, or acquiescing into participating, in a long tradition of families being photographed at holiday time in their holiday best? That my mother made me the mug, in part to indicate that she recognizes and accepts my tribe as family? What about my pregnancy—is that inherently heteronormative? Or is the presumed opposition of queerness and procreation (or, to put a finer edge on it, maternity) more a reactionary embrace of how things have shaken down for queers than the mark of some ontological truth? As more queers have kids, will the presumed opposition simply wither away? Will you miss it?20

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Nelson’s interrogation of the category of heteronormativity, in the name of queerness, transforms the “you” here from Harry to her friend and, also, to the reader. We confront the dissonance of representation with reality, the way in which the reification of the “I” can obscure the “self” which interacts with it. Notice the dialectic in the first half of the passage between questions that begin with “what” and those that begin with “that.” This is followed by the consequentialism as Nelson juxtaposes those (here unanswered) with a decidedly transitional “Or.” The coda—“Will you miss it?”—is at once imploring and an indictment. Nelson is not done with this occasion, since it prompts The Argonauts’s announcement of its major claim: that “queer” designates the otherness that defies all conventions precisely because it honors the dialectic of self and other: Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from—one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)? What about the fact that Harry is neither male nor female? I’m a special—a two for one, his character Valentine explains in By Hook or By Crook.21

Nelson juxtaposes her own reflection with passages from Butler on kinship systems and their transformation. The root of the issue turns Nelson and the reader back to the question of language, and the inevitability that language fixes reality despite any attempts to qualify its expression. Nelson clearly respects the work that words like “heteronormativity” have done, but she equally clearly despairs of their distortive impact on the family she seeks together with Harry to foster. This is encapsulated in the episode’s final quote from Harry’s character Valentine, which in fact deploys language quite brilliantly—a classic convention of salesmanship, at once readily recognizable to all consumers yet signifying what is transgressive of convention (while nodding to sexual commodification). 2. THE ARGONAUTS II: RETRIEVAL— A SELF BIRTHS HER OTHER So far we have examined ways in which the shape-shifting performativity of the world raises issues of justice on the level of construal, interaction, and— crucially—representation. We turn now to Nelson’s even more introspective

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meditations—those that have to do with the dialectic of “self” and “other” as its references her own person. Two are particularly revelatory: Nelson’s rendition of her personal response to a scholarly exchange between Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss, and her description of her experience of giving birth which overarches the concluding sections of The Argonauts. One concerns justice in a university classroom, the other justice in a hospital. In Ricoeur’s terms, justice for self and other in just institutions is brought to a particularly performative enactment in these two episodes. Each carries forward what we have seen in Nelson’s narrative to be both the powers and the limits of language fully to capture the dialectic of the self and its other, just as each also underscores how the social complexities of action have their direct counterpart in the individual. In a brilliantly drawn set scene, Nelson, a newly matriculated graduate student at CUNY, is invited to a seminar in which Jane Gallop presents her most recent scholarship and Rosalind Krauss responds. The conventional mix of informality and solemnity that characterizes the academic seminar is in broad tonal contrast to Gallop’s presentation, a slide show presenting scenes (photographed by her husband) in which she is naked and playing with her baby. Gallop sought with her presentation, albeit in a somewhat general way, to query Barthes’ too ready linkage of genders with objecthood and subjecthood in Camera Lucida. Nelson cues her reader: “I liked that Gallop was onto something and letting us in on it before she fully understood it.”22 Krauss, presented by Nelson as Gallop’s antitype—buttoned-down and elegant where Gallop is frowsy and louche—lauds Gallop’s work on Lacan and then, on the basis of its excellence, excoriates her seminar presentation: “the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop’s maternity had rotted her mind—besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.”23 Nelson comments, I didn’t have a baby then, nor did I have any designs on having one. . . . But I was enough of a feminist to refuse any knee-jerk quarantining of the feminine or the maternal from the realm of intellectual profundity. And, as I remember it, Krauss was not simply quarantining; she was shaming. In the face of such shaming, I had no choice. I stood with Gallop.24

Nelson’s rhetoric here is akin to a justice rendering a legal opinion. She locates the point of contestation: what is the role of the feminine and the maternal in intellectual life? She acknowledges that in some circumstances, the feminine and the maternal may not contribute to intellectual profundity. She then finds that, in the case before her, what happened was not the assertion of such a plausible claim, but something that obviates entirely the claim’s

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nuance: shaming, a form of dismissal that de facto renders null any and all assertions that the feminine and the maternal can contribute knowledge and wisdom. In Nelson’s terms, Krauss assumed that language was sufficient to reality. In Ricoeur’s terms, Krauss assumed that Gallop’s presentational “I” was fully transparent to her selfhood. This set piece elicits one of the most declarative ethical statements found in The Argonauts. Shaming (even by and among senior faculty) is unacceptable. There are, to be clear, respects in which the entire project of advocacy for a revisionist conception of queerness can be summarized in this way. But when Nelson discusses Harry, or her family and personal friends in relation to Harry, the assessment is less declarative because the stakes are internal—they have to do with her own negotiation with her self, and this more autobiographical mode of reflection characteristically elicits reflection on the internal dynamics of either her domesticity (love that overcomes all) or the social circumstances that enable certain forms of insensitivity (from those who do not or apparently cannot know better) or shaming (from those who should but don’t, usually due to an theory of queerness at odds with Nelson’s own practice of it). Nelson’s verdict is, to be clear, not surprising, but it is strikingly dramatic, and it is worth thinking about why that is the case. We can begin to make some progress in understanding this singularity by recognizing the care with which Nelson presents Gallop as openly vulnerable—“onto something and letting us in on it before she fully understood it.” Gallop’s vulnerability is her willingness to in some sense be in two places at once: to know, and not to know; to take the podium and present work, and to do so with the open acknowledgment that the work is in process, even unfinished. Gallop was, in sum, performing against academic convention. She took a risk. (This is almost exactly the manner in which Ricoeur opens any of his projects.) In turn, Krauss chose to follow convention and—worse—refused to recognize Gallop’s decision. What Nelson sees as Krauss’s shaming is thus a refusal to acknowledge Gallop’s self-proclaimed separation of her “I” from her “self,” of the separation of the accomplished scholar of Lacanian psychoanalysis from the speculative, tentative explorer of Barthes. In the argot of The Argonauts, Gallop shifted shapes and Krauss refused to acknowledge it. Like the Greek heroes who joined Jason on his journey, Nelson stood quasiheroically for Gallop. The degree to which what I am here terming Nelson’s quasijuridical, quasiheroic standing for Gallop is enabled by Gallop’s externality to Nelson as her own sort of shift-shaper comes into clearer relief if we turn to Nelson’s most literal shape-shifting in The Argonauts: her pregnancy. This is an example of the relation of “self” and “other” that Ricoeur could not have experienced and does not address. One supporting thread of the narrative of her son Iggy’s birth is Nelson’s repeated citations of the child psychologist D. W. Winnicott.

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Nelson is avidly citational throughout The Argonauts, and on my reading at least her citations of Winnicott are singular in that they are ubiquitous and quasioracular. Nelson’s citational practice is almost without exception appreciative, but more than a few are framed or qualified, and relatively few if any achieve Winnicott’s capacity of “chiming” so resonantly with Nelson’s upbuilding scientific discourse of queerness. The clearest reason for this is Winnicott’s own particular performative justice: his superior mix of common sense and realism, buttressed throughout The Argonauts by the crucial consideration that, at least as rendered by Nelson, his aphorisms betray few if any of the usual accoutrements of binary thinking about motherhood. It is not difficult to understand the appeal, indeed almost the miraculous sense of appreciative discovery, such a tenor would have for a woman seeking to become pregnant through artificial insemination with a partner who is transitioning. Everything about Nelson’s pregnancy is at once difficult and joyous. It is simultaneously a contemplative and an active process. It is not incidental that it focalizes all of The Argonauts’s tensive thematic energies: the powers and limits of language, the telescopic and microscopic narrative techniques that render the text its own in-process myth or sacred history, and most decisively the actualization of domesticity on her and Harry’s terms. It punctuates, perhaps more than any other occasion in the text, the experience of “radical intimacy/difference.”25 It is straightforward, I suggest, to recognize how Nelson’s account pushes Oneself as Another toward the possibility that the dialectic at the heart of his “little ethic” is one through which one can perform (not merely do) queer justice. While Nelson relates aspects of the physical experiences of her pregnancy, from the difficulties of artificial insemination to experiences of ultrasound to puzzles about capacities to perform essential mothering acts such as breastfeeding, the action of her pregnancy is, to a very significant degree, action in her own mind—the “I” discovering its “self” in its emergence as a mother. The discovery makes her ruminative in an especially reflexive way, as when she discusses her attitudes about abortion during her pregnancy: Why do we have to measure his kidneys and freak out about their size every week if we’ve already decided we are not going to take him out early or do anything to treat him until after he’s born? I asked the doctor rolling the sticky ultrasound shaft over my belly for seemingly the thousandth time. Well, most mothers want to know as much as possible about the condition of their babies, she said, avoiding my eyes.26

Italicized type juxtaposes with standard to punctuate Nelson’s anatomically exact description and its implications with the (female) pediatrician’s rote

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generalities. It accentuates Nelson’s felt experience of pregnancy: that it at once brings her into full communion with the being who will be Iggy and separates her from everyone else. Read entirely out of context, Nelson’s query accords in sensibility with pro-life/anti-abortion activists in its uneasiness with any medical intervention in a pregnancy. Further enhancing Nelson’s “in-body/out-of-body” dynamic is the fact that her pregnancy coincides with the publication of her book on cruelty27 and an obligatory book tour. She endures numerous allusions to her pregnancy in Q&A sessions which she finds seemingly well-meaning but in fact annoying. Inside are other thoughts: Truth be told, when we first started trying to conceive, I had hoped to be done with my cruelty project and onto something “cheerier,” so that the baby might have more upbeat accompaniment in utero. But I needn’t have worried—not only did getting pregnant take much longer than I’d wanted it to, but pregnancy itself taught me how irrelevant such a hope was. Babies grow in a helix of hope and fear; gestating draws one but deeper into the spiral. It isn’t cruel in there, but it’s dark. I would have explained this to the playwright, but he had already left the room.28

“Truth be told” moves us from the podium where we have seen Nelson the author reply to queries about how a pregnant woman could write about cruelty, to the mental space in which she is in deep physico-imaginative colloquy with her child. The gestational helix of hope and fear is simply the reality and it is well beyond any query about an author and her book. This passage is the connecting tissue between the scene of the ultrasound and two further paragraphs directly describing moments in her pregnancy. In the first, Nelson is hospitalized for some bleeding and a possible placental issue. On this occasion, her doctor talks around the fact that the worst-case scenario was one in which her baby would survive and Nelson would not. This prompts the following self-realization: Now, I loved my hard-won baby-to-be fiercely, but I was in no way ready to bow out of this vale of tears for his survival. Nor do I think those who love me would have looked too kindly on such a decision—a decision that doctors elsewhere on the globe are mandated to make, and that the die-hard antiabortionists are going for here.29

“Now” here presages a pronouncement. The reader readily grasps the full and fully earned weight of the words “loved” and “fiercely” and “hard-won.” The qualifying “but” completes the rhetorical arrangement announced by the “Now” and locates Nelson and her pregnancy in yet a third arena: not

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on a podium where she is the pregnant author of a book about (of all things) cruelty, not on an examining table for an ultrasound that underscores the discrepancy between what is her pregnancy and its medical treatment, but in a world in which any pregnant woman who has any consideration that deviates from the expectation of delivery is deviant. However “queer” her aspirations, Nelson here identifies with any pregnant woman and asserts a complexity to pregnancy that is at once entirely real to the expectant mother and ignored not just by the conventions of medical professionals but by wider social forces. Nelson refuses to shame herself. Behind this reaction is the key to what Nelson means when she writes that “it’s dark in there”—it is a matter of life and death, as becomes extraordinarily clear in her rendition of her labor and delivery of Iggy. The experience of the final months of pregnancy is insistently physical: the growing Iggy pushing ribs and organs around to make room for himself, a clarity about truths of the female anatomy that were previously quite abstract, levels of vague but constant discomfort and distension. It is a somatic “being for another by virtue of another,” and not conceptually. Nelson’s mantras as she goes into labor are, from outside herself, the exhortation to “let the baby out,” and from inside herself, the imminent sense that she is “falling forever” and must, literally, “go to pieces” to bear her son. Nelson’s insistence that the reader join her in confronting the physicality of her pregnancy brings a new dimension to Ricoeur’s conception of self in relation to other: that the distance of “I” and “self” can, perhaps especially for a woman who is pregnant, be made literal in the shape-shifting change of a pregnancy. Ricoeur comes closest to what Nelson here describes in a much earlier text, The Symbolism of Evil; but there it is “the rich palette of sin” that approximates the dark side of agency. The danger of Ricoeur’s formulation is, again, the prospect of a binary formulation and the concomitant risk of rendering the queer as sinful. Precisely such debates should animate the just university. This last movement of The Argonauts has as its counterpoint to the late stages of Nelson’s pregnancy the death of Harry’s mother. Nelson’s narration creates a crescendo effect that links birth with death and, not incidentally, gives us Harry in his own voice describing the last moments of his mother’s life. It is its own kind of labor, for parent and for child, and its own kind of leap of faith into an unknown. Just as Nelson must exhort Iggy’s cooperation in coming into the world, so Harry must exhort his mother to leave it. Both must push for reasons that, if seemingly different, are commensurate in their compassion. The juxtaposition leaves Nelson with an insight about the experience of birth. Echoing and narratively resolving the earlier discussion of the consequences of bleeding, Nelson writes of delivery: “If all goes well, the baby

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will make it out alive, and so will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way.”30 It is this that she needed to hear, but did not, during her hospitalization. The reader can see now how easily medical routine can become flippant—removed from the reality that it ostensibly treats, and that is so immediate and urgent to the mother. (Where was Winnicott at that moment?) And here, now, Nelson can bring her narrative full circle, articulating in full the uncanny juxtaposition of her book tour on cruelty with her own pregnancy: People say women forget about the pain of labor, due to some kind of Godgiven amnesia that keeps the species reproducing. But that isn’t quite right— after all, what does it mean for pain to be “memorable”? You’re either in pain or you’re not. And it isn’t the pain that one forgets. It’s the touching death part.31

As this passage suggests, Nelson is no particular friend of religion, or at least of religion as predicated on the existence of a deity. Without wishing in any way to qualify that dimension of its narrative sensibility, it is also true that The Argonauts makes frequent recourse to religious language: words like “sacred,” “revelations,” “a certain turning,” “finitude,” “transubstantiates,” “the soul,” “the innocents,” “righteousness,” “communion, “mystic,” “vision,” “infinity,” and “messianic fantasy” and—in the last sentence— “nothingness” and its “ongoing song.” The point of this list is not to retrieve Nelson’s text as “religious.” It is rather to suggest that her own narrative tenaciously pursues justice to selves in their dual complexity. This leads her to take recourse to religious language, with stakes that are sometimes negative and at others positive. Nelson sets the stage for this. On its first page, The Argonauts invokes “the deeper idea” in the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, not the more quoted “Whereof one cannot speak, there of one must be silent,” but his idea of the inexpressible inexpressibly contained in expression. Nelson goes on to aver that “nothing you can say can fuck up the space for God,”32 a space that includes not just storefront chapels and Gothic cathedrals but the bedroom where Harry initially seduces Nelson. All of this seems an utterly apt, entirely integral foreshadowing of the narrative’s religious language. Nelson’s engagement of the complexities of the self leads her to articulate a claim for queerness as an ontological category beyond any binary system (whether theoretical, political, or religious). It is those binary systems which claim one space for God over other spaces. And it is precisely that claim that the postulate of queerness rebuts. If we then move to the final page of The Argonauts, we discover the affirmation that accompanies the initial negation: if God is in any space, God is in no space, and life is an ongoing song to that nothingness.

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CONCLUSION Is, then, The Argonauts’s idea of queerness in sympathy with Ricoeur’s “little ethic”? Is the idea of Oneself as Another in sympathy with Nelson’s “shapeshifting”? If we recall Ricoeur’s little ethic—“aiming at a good life with and for others in just institutions”—I suggest that the answers to these questions are affirmative in three respects, two indexed above and the third invoked there but meriting elaboration here. The first two points of sympathy concern the narrative rhetoric Nelson deploys, and its ensuing engagement of a self that is not, to deploy Ricoeur’s terms, transparent to itself. Nelson consistently queries the relation of a proclaimed “I” to a differentiated “self” that is “other” to that “I.” She does so in her descriptions of her interactions with people, with institutions, and finally with herself. In each set of cases her concern is chiefly one of recognition, and with it of the degree that it is possible to reconcile self and other. Her steadfast attention to this results in the predication of queerness as an innate ontological category: each of us is different from whom we proclaim ourselves to be, intentionally or not, and with varying degrees of charity or of meanness. While Nelson would certainly abjure the terms, for reasons articulated in what follows, there is a close relation between Ricoeur’s sense that any phenomenology requires a hermeneutic and Nelson’s disciplined, intentional movement from description to assessment. Within this broad agreement, there is an important qualification. All this is in service, for both thinkers, in an ethic of “a good life with and for others.” While each cares deeply about “just institutions” and clearly regards them as integral to any ethical system, Nelson’s abiding suspicion of binary thought tempers whatever optimism she might have for the realization of justice in any institution. Domesticity affords for Nelson a refuge from a public square about which she is deeply skeptical. Ricoeur, by contrast, is more optimistic in the end that the good life with and for others can and will translate to a reflective “public square.” This achieves more explicit expression when placed in proximity with Nelson’s decision to foreground sexuality, as both theory and practice. This is almost certainly divergent from anything Ricoeur would have anticipated. (It is certainly not in any straightforward sense anticipated by his own reading of Freud, for example.) In part, I would argue that Nelson’s text presses Ricoeur’s “little ethic” to extend the realm of experience overtly, and in the end primarily and primally, to sex, gender, and their foundational roles in the formation of self and identity. The key words in this qualification are “primarily” and “primally.” Ricoeur’s rendition of Freud as philosophical could in theory accommodate this, but would almost surely be regarded by Nelson as reductive. On the basis of The Argonauts, Nelson would insist on

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the ontological status of queerness, worrying that Ricoeur’s classic philosophical touchstones—Kant and Hegel in general, Descartes and Nietzsche in Oneself as Another—inevitably reduplicate the binaries that only queerness can address on the levels of theory and practice. This is a debate about the heritage of the Western tradition that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick forcefully introduces,33 and that Nelson appropriates. It is difficult to imagine a philosopher working critically with Ricoeur’s categories of suspicion and retrieval in today’s university who would not regard it as a matter of justice to engage Sedgwick’s claim. The remaining question, requiring elaboration here, concerns the concept of “nothingness.” As invoked in the final sentence of The Argonauts, “nothingness” is the object of “ongoing song,” undertaken in spaces that are the likely and unlikely places reserved for a God who may not exist. It is, I suggest, Nelson’s summative formulation of the ongoing project of discovering “queerness.” With it, Nelson (indirectly) draws the reader of Ricoeur from Oneself as Another to his reading of Augustine’s Confessions in the first volume of Time and Narrative. In that text—which, as noted at the outset of this essay, spawned the work of Oneself as Another—Ricoeur renders an Augustine whose narrator is, in certain respects, quite similar to the narrator of The Argonauts. Each is interchangeable with the text’s nominative author, and each addresses a “you” who is at once other than the speaker yet essential to the speaker’s identity. Nelson’s queerness has its counterpart in Augustine’s “restless soul,” and each seeks a worldly resolution that gestures to an uncertain but essential future. In these respects, The Argonauts can be read as a rewriting of Confessions but one in which the regulative category is not conversion but transition, each of which expresses decisive, life-changing radicality. Those who would reject this comparison would turn to the dynamic of time and eternity in Confessions and note that it reflects a very different ontology from that of Nelson. Such a claim pivots on the degree to which the final books of Confessions do or do not resolve the temporal dilemmas that so relentlessly distended Augustine. For his part, Ricoeur did not see in the philosophical restatement a resolution of the time/eternity relation; instead he saw its rearticulation in scriptural terms. It would be more rather than less accurate to borrow from Nelson’s own coda, and term the final books of Confessions “an ongoing song to nothingness.” Put differently: for Ricoeur, Augustine’s conversion is fully true to creation ex nihilo. The retrieval of the afterlife is accompanied with the recognition that we can know little of such things other than that they are at once necessary, and necessarily meaningful. Nelson’s transition to queerness arrives at a strikingly similar predication. As noted in the introduction, the aim of this essay has been to enact a process of critical thinking on Ricoeurian terms that makes Nelson’s The

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Argonauts essential to thinking about justice in and for others, in just institutions. Nelson embodies the complementary moments of Ricoeur’s project of critical thinking: she offers her own hermeneutic of suspicion and retrieval, in which a rendition of the aporiae of our heritage is interrogated with both charity and relentless clarity, toward an assessment of its shortcomings and its possibilities for the present moment. Nelson’s current practice was Ricoeur’s practice; each is exemplary of the core value of the just university. Each needs the other. The Argonauts is the performative interlocutor ne plus ultra for the theoretical agenda announced in Oneself as Another.

NOTES 1. Ricoeur’s capstone contribution thus inverts the trajectory represented in the major statements of Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue) and Stanley Hauerwas (A Community of Character), in which ethics takes recourse to narrative. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) and Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 2. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blaney (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 3. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2015). 4. Nelson, Argonauts, 114. 5. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 172. 6. I borrow the phrase from James Gustafson’s Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 3ff. 7. I am indebted to Daniel Boscaljon for this formulation. 8. I have developed this argument in detail in Richard A. Rosengarten, “The Recalcitrant Distentio of Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative,” Literature and Theology 27, no. 2 (June 2013): 170–182. 9. Nelson, Argonauts, 5. See also Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1977). 10. Nelson’s depiction of marriage is an apposite example of Ricoeur’s formulation of the idem/ipse relation. It also echoes J. L. Austin’s exemplary speech-act (the statement of “I do” in taking marriage vows). Oneself as Another locates the source of confusion about “I” and “self” in the tradition of analytic philosophy, which parallels The Argonauts’ frustration with misappropriations of Judith Butler’s concept of performativity and the restrictions of what counts as “queer” to theories of sexuality and sexual practices. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 11. Nelson, Argonauts, 4. 12. Nelson, Argonauts, 28–29. 13. Nelson, Argonauts, 70.

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14. I borrow this formulation from two sources: as metaphor for the functions and the analysis of myth, from Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 7–26; and as “multi-focal optics” for reading the New Testament Gospels, from Margaret M. Mitchell, “Gospel Optics,” in Writing the Gospels: A Dialogue with Francis Watson, ed. Catherine Sider Hamilton with Joel Willitts (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2019), 184–205. 15. Nelson, Argonauts, 97. 16. Nelson, Argonauts, 60, all emphasis original. 17. Nelson, Argonauts, 94, 95, all emphasis original. 18. Nelson, Argonauts, 72. 19. Nelson, Argonauts, 13, emphasis original. 20. Nelson, Argonauts, 13. 21. Nelson, Argonauts, 13–14, emphasis original. 22. Nelson, Argonauts, 40. 23. Nelson, Argonauts, 41. 24. Nelson, Argonauts, 42. 25. Nelson, Argonauts, 87. 26. Nelson, Argonauts, 92, emphasis original. 27. Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York: Norton, 2011). 28. Nelson, Argonauts, 92. 29. Nelson, Argonauts, 93. 30. Nelson, Argonauts, 134. 31. Nelson, Argonauts, 134. 32. Nelson, Argonauts, 3. 33. Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1977. Doniger, Wendy. The Implied Spider. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Gustafson, James. Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Hamilton, Catherine Sider, ed., with Joel Willitts. Writing the Gospels: A Dialogue with Francis Watson. London and New York: T&T Clark, 2019. Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Mitchell, Margaret M. “Gospel Optics.” In Writing the Gospels: A Dialogue with Francis Watson. Edited by Catherine Sider Hamilton with Joel Willitts, 184–205. London and New York: T&T Clark, 2019.

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Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2015. ———. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. New York: Norton, 2011. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blaney. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Rosengarten, Richard A. “The Recalcitrant Distentio of Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative.” Literature and Theology 27, no. 2 (June 2013): 170–182. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofksy. Epistemology of the Closet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Chapter 7

Embodied Pedagogy Reflections on Becoming Oneself Verna Marina Ehret

This essay is a reflection on the journey of becoming oneself in the pedagogical environment with special consideration for the invisible or marginalized in the classroom. One of the great challenges of the humanities in an American university is the process of, as Karen Buenavista Hanna says, decolonizing the classroom to give epistemological privilege to the voices so often unheard. In reflecting on this journey, it will be useful to think with the tools provided by Paul Ricoeur in the construction of narrative, hermeneutics, and the process of becoming oneself. The humanities classroom environment is a place fraught with expectation, possibility, and disappointment. A class in the humanities is a blank slate until imagined by the instructor. Deciding the beginning requires a sense of the end. From there, one defines the path in terms of themes and topics covered and the tools used to achieve that goal through readings, assignments, activities, and so forth. Does one follow the traditional path of the “Great Thinkers” of the past, or does one privilege the epistemological wisdom of marginalized voices? What are the risks and rewards of each path? Developing a course in the humanities opens infinite possibilities to be and become in relation to the content. Teaching in a Just University aims to develop each individual in the room—teacher and students. In addition, it is in achieving this goal that a pedagogical hermeneutic can be developed through application of the insights of Paul Ricoeur. In “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics” Ricoeur notes that all understanding involves interpretation. Interpretation contains both belonging and distanciation. One dwells within the dialogue of the interpretation while also being separated from that which one interprets. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics emphasizes the relationship of the self to the text, which can be expanded to nontextual narrative construction of the self. The process of interpretation can 141

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summon the self. We become ourselves in relation to the classroom content, text, and discourse.1 Imagining a course directly contributes to the becoming of the instructor and students in the process of interpreting texts and in the further creative activity of discussing and writing interpretations. The students, along with all of their visible and invisible differences, embark on a journey with the instructor to reach a goal of personal development. Often, the humanities classroom is less about the simple content and more about the journey and growth of every person in the room to become more compassionate, more engaged with the dynamics of humanity that surround them, and more aware of who they are and what they value. That journey is the unfolding of the personal narrative of each member of the group in relation to the unfolding narratives of every other member. In other words, humanities education is, arguably, a fundamentally hermeneutical enterprise where the group is collectively using a specific framework provided by the course content and methods of learning in order to grow into an interpretation of a set of ideas and their individual identity within them. Each member is emplotted in their own story and becomes a plot point in the story of others. Narrative identities are constructed through the hermeneutical work of understanding by reading, writing, and discussion in the classroom. Hermeneutics frames the interpretation of these narratives. Narrative identity as described by Ricoeur is not a destination. It is a journey of the cycle of knowing, not knowing, reconfiguring, and returning to myself anew. To be a self is to be dialectical and, within that dialectic, to be dynamic. Mallett and Wapshott, in looking at identity development in the workplace, describe the self-reflexive quality of Ricoeur’s narrative identity through the hermeneutical process of “prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration.”2 The workplace, like the classroom, forces us to face our whole selves in the world and as reflected back to us by others’ perceptions. We are embodied selves, and that embodiment requires the constant reinterpretation of our narratives. One part of the framing of this interpretation is the process itself. Hermeneutics here is the analysis of discourse as narrative.3 The other part of the framing is coming to know oneself in the exchange with others, and creating an environment in which others may also come to know themselves. One might describe this recognition or refiguration as a pedagogical hermeneutic, interpreting the narratives of self and others in the frame of the learning environment in such a way as to summon the self of teacher and student. In addition to the hermeneutical work of understanding their emplotment as individuals and in relation to those nearby, marginalized students struggle to be seen for who they are, to be recognized, and, in that recognition, to cognize themselves. The hermeneutical process is transformative of oneself in relation to the world. It is not without risk. The risk of the narrative construction that happens in the classroom is students are not only trying to be

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seen but also learning to see themselves. For many marginalized students, this means reckoning with a “recognition” that transforms who they are as individuals into tokens that either fit or fight a stereotype anchored by the narrative. This risk means that the process of course creation is an integral part of the growth of the student in both helpful and potentially harmful ways There is always a risk of creating even greater marginalization in the attempts to overcome it. It is these marginalized people, both as teachers and as students, who are the focus of this essay. Because of dominant social narratives that create marginalization, those on the margins in many ways are the most in need of being seen in the content of the classroom. 1. NARRATIVE BECOMING Perhaps the most important aspect of Ricoeur’s account of the self for this project is his repeated claim that we do not know ourselves. In her analysis of Ricoeur’s “hermeneutic phenomenology,” Pamela Sue Anderson continually returns to Ricoeur’s notion of “the capable subject” in relation to the feminist understanding of the subject.4 This work thinks with Ricoeur on the notion of subjectivity and the idea that subjectivity is in need of restoration. While women are capable subjects, Anderson emphasizes that “it remains necessary to stress that the capable subject’s self-understanding must consider its lived body as socially and materially located: and this includes its gendered locatedness.”5 Looking specifically at women as capable subjects, what Anderson points out is the ways that our embodiment can be used to destroy self-confidence, stripping us of ourselves as capable subjects. The same could be argued for any other form of marginalization of our embodied selves. Women’s lived experience, as evidenced by such things as the #metoo movement, is an embattled embodiment. Judged often first by our physical appearance—attractive or unattractive, strong or weak, aggressive or compliant—our lived experience as embodied means we are limited by the perception and gaze of the other that ultimately leaves us unseen, challenging our status as capable subjects. What Anderson draws out in her analysis of Ricoeur in light of current feminist theory is that we do not know who we are, and in that not knowing we lose confidence that, at an earlier age, we may have had.6 In a sense, we learn disunity. The self that we are is taken apart. However, what is taken apart can also be rebuilt. The process of growing up is growing into oneself. We are, as Ricoeur described it, summoned into ourselves through the narratives in which we participate.7 Although Ricoeur often frames his discussion through biblical narratives, he does not approach these narratives as simply theoretical. Biblical narratives are stories of lived experience. We participate

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in the worlds these narratives create. In addition, in that participation, in our full embodiment, we are called into ourselves. Nevertheless, that summoning is not initially into a knowing who we are.8 Rather, it can be seen as an invitation into a dialogue with one’s possibilities to be. The broader one’s engagement with the world, the more varied one’s possibilities become. I do not become myself so much as I learn how to be in a state of becoming and incorporate that becoming into myself. While modern thought began the discussion of the self with Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, Ricoeur describes the sum as preceding the cogito. I do not exist because I think, I think because I exist. Ricoeur’s language for this is drawn from his study of Freud as a counterpoint to modernity’s notions of self: apodicticity and adequation. Apodicticity refers to being in the world. There is a strong sense in which my awareness of myself is as a whole self, not just a thinking self. I am embodied, and in my embodiment I am, quite simply, confused about who I am. Ricoeur, building on Freud, argues that our initial awareness of self is to be mistaken about who we are because our perception of ourselves does not match our reality. Adequation, on the other hand, refers to when our perception of ourselves is of ourselves as we are.9 One can think of watching a recording of oneself. Our physical appearances tends not to match what we imagine ourselves to look like, especially as we get older, and the sound of our voices often surprises us. At the same time, there is a process of acceptance that happens in recognition where it becomes possible, at least theoretically, to see myself as I am. The dialectical nature of human experience is a constant interaction between who I am, who I think I am, and who I am to others. This dialectic makes adequation an almost impossible goal. Who I am is reflected back to me in the gaze of others and myself. Therefore, my reflexive self and my reflected self are disunified. When the two selves are in conflict, I cannot feel seen for who I am. The narrative arc of our lives is marked by the process of coming to know ourselves by being called, through narratives, to be ourselves. However, perhaps the summoned self is not a simple unity. Perhaps the capable subject that was lost in one narrative is regained in another that recognizes multiplicity in unity. We are summoned toward ourselves in the disunified narrative of myself created through the tension between the reality of apodicticity and the desire for adequation. Returning, then, to Anderson’s analysis of the capable subject, she reminds us that Ricoeur’s thinking and writing comes from within his own embodiment. His claim that becoming oneself involves first a loss of a sense of capability and then a regaining of it exists within a social narrative where the loss of a sense of being capable is heightened for those who do not fit into the layers of privilege in which Ricoeur lived. Yet, acknowledging that limitation of his perspective does not negate the power of his claim. Rather, one could

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argue that it becomes even truer for those who are marginalized by the narratives of privilege. Anderson notes, in fact, (re)configurations of a woman’s qualitative identity by patriarchal cultures have shattered the female subject’s self-understanding as originally innocent. Patriarchal configurations of Eve’s sinful act—like those of Antigone—have the power to undermine la femme capable. In this way, the subject loses confidence in her own ability to understand herself.10

One need not see this shattering of self-understanding only in the case of women. All who live on the margins of “standard” in whatever society they exist will face this shattering. In the United States, this will include people of color, people who are differently abled, people who are neuro-atypical, people who are gender-atypical, and many other forms. That the list could be much longer in itself calls into question how majoritarian the “typical,” who are privileged in American social narratives, actually are. Before addressing this, however, I will offer a basic understanding of narrative and the hermeneutical construction of identity. The components of narratology for Ricoeur include (1) the art of emplotment, (2) the epistemological status of the intelligibility of that emplotment, (3) the role of tradition, and (4) the “meaning” of narrative.11 While in this particular discussion Ricoeur was talking about written narratives, one can expand this to the “self,” the narrative that one is. The process of narrative construction and the questions raised by it include (1) the process of placing oneself in a received narrative, (2) reworking this into a narrative that is somehow cohesive, creating an intelligible place for oneself in the received narrative, (3) understanding how this merged narrative fits into the larger cultural narrative, and (4) responding to how the narrative gives meaning to life by calling one into oneself through the narrative. It is not only that I am called to myself through, for example, the religious narratives in which I am emplaced. I also am called to myself in creating my own narrative of myself in the larger narratives that overlap and intertwine with my own. As each of us unfolds our own narrative, we engage those of others and the larger narratives that drive society. These larger narratives are metanarratives and the individual are little or local narratives. This language is problematic in the sense that it gives greater status to a seemingly unified narrative in which each of us takes part. I will add to this scheme what I have elsewhere described as the transcontextual narrative, that is, the ability to live within the overlapping narratives and liminal spaces created by them to build community without creating an artificial metanarrative. What this discussion of narrative means for the marginalized of society in the classroom environment is that the received narrative itself is one of

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disadvantage, which shapes how one engages course content if it reinforces or challenges the metanarrative and the subsequent little narratives of identity that develop. While as a small child I might see myself as capable, the ongoing process of unfolding my narrative within the larger received narrative often means that I as a marginalized person can only make sense of the narrative if I am not a capable self. The longer that narrative continues, the harder it is for me to see myself as capable. A pedagogical path that recognizes the way those on the margins of privilege unfold their narratives in it can open up the possibilities for becoming a capable self. By contrast, not to recognize how marginalization happens in individual and collective narratives means the classroom can become a place where marginalization is reified. These narratives do not unfold in a vacuum. They develop in relation to each other and in the context of engaging the course material. The capable subject of the instructor, especially an instructor who has developed that capable self while being marginalized by social narratives, becomes both a model of becoming a self and a dialogue partner in that process. 2. THE TEACHING SELF The self is summoned through narrative. So to begin the process of receiving my summoned self as a teacher, I must understand my narrative as it intersects with the pedagogical environment. Who I am, and what I do and do not know of myself comes to bear in the construction and delivery of the course. If I begin in my reflections with my own narrative identity, I can see where my being precedes my knowing. Sometimes my knowing reflects my reality. More often, it does not. In part, this is because of how my narrative intersects with the larger social narratives. But in part, it is also that through the life of humanities education I have become increasingly aware of myself and the ways in which I am and am not who I think I am. All of this informs my life in the Religious Studies classroom as a part of its narrative construction and layers of becoming. My story, told briefly here, continually intersects for good and for evil, with larger societal stories. The symbolism of these larger stories shapes who I am in both my acceptance and my rejection of them. When I was interviewing for jobs, my dissertation advisor told me I should note that I am Latina as something that would help me stand out in the crowd. I did not say anything about it in my applications, but I did include my middle name, as it is also the name of my Honduran grandmother. It felt false to claim my Latina heritage too strongly. My dissertation advisor, however, included a brief comment about me as a Latina scholar in his recommendation letters. Those two things were the only indicators of my status as a person of color. I do not work in liberation or feminist theologies

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and the current state of my Spanish would make it difficult for me to carry on a lengthy conversation with a toddler. I have always been Honduran, but I have also always been German and British. My mother immigrated to the United States at twenty after she and my father got married. She used to joke about being a resident alien, which was how she was described on her green card. Looking back at my childhood, I do not know why our home was not bilingual, but my strong suspicion is that we needed to fit in to the societal narratives of rural Minnesota. We needed to be successful in a world that was definitely not Honduran. I grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota at a time when Minnesota was still heavily Scandinavian. In fact, the next town over was actually called Scandia. Diversity in my high school amounted to roughly seven students of color in a school of almost 2,000. We were a novelty, at best. My brother is very dark skinned with dark, curly hair. Well over six feet tall, he stood out. At five foot five inches with dark brown hair and olive skin, people rarely thought about me as “different” unless they knew my brother or my mother, who is clearly Honduran. My sister and I have always looked more like our father. I knew I was Honduran, but I did not know what that meant. I was shocked the first time I was disinvited to a party because my friend’s father would never tolerate me in his house. I was sixteen and never thought much about being different or looking different from the people around me. This was a moment of disunity, of not being capable. This was a moment of awakening to the apodicticity of my personal narrative, because who I thought I was did not match how other people saw me. This shock reverberated through the following years. I was shocked the first time I was referred to as a “halfbreed” as if it was some kind of a joke. I had never thought about my identity in that way and was not prepared to rebuild my personal narrative. The one I currently had fit into a societal narrative. It worked fine if I glossed over some personal details and did not think about it too much. This moment was another in a series that made me rethink myself. The first time I realized that I really did not know who I was came a couple of years earlier when I went to graduate school. The weekend before school started, I was in downtown New Haven, at the mall, and as I looked around me, I noticed that everyone around me was Latinx. Everyone. I suddenly felt very self-conscious, as if I stood out and did not belong there. I had spent my childhood traveling to Honduras with my family and always felt as if I belonged, but that was because I was in Honduras, so of course I fit in. However, in the United States, I was “white.” And there, in the middle of a closing department store with everything on sale, I realized that I had been raised to fit in to a world that was predominately white, and where I had neither been seen for who I was nor had I really seen myself. Moreover, I had learned the lesson so well, that I did not realize I was now surrounded by

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people who looked more like me than anyone I had grown up with or even gone to college with. Eventually, I realized that my struggles informed my growing awareness of my role as a teacher. My attempts to see and be seen were reflected in and undermined by the things I studied and the discussions I had about those things. These challenges are not unique to me. Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia is a collection of essays by women of color at various stages of their careers in the academy. Their stories reflect their questions of when to speak and when to be silent, what kind of support (or lack thereof) one will receive from colleagues, administration, and students, and concerns about the precarious position of being the “right” kind of minority in order to succeed.12 Their stories opened new levels of understanding. This is partly, if not primarily, because they are largely narratives. They engage the problems of seeing and being seen in the academic life through telling individual narratives, which in turn provided me with a set of symbols that gave rise to new thoughts. Those thoughts resonate strongly with those who have had similar experiences and open up levels of intersecting narratives for others that challenge metanarrative. In reading their stories, I began to feel seen, both by myself and by these invisible others. My self-narrative has continued to evolve, where that narrative is the meeting point of being and knowing, of seeing and being seen. Because I identify as a teacher, the classroom is where I feel most compelled to understand who I am. This searching began for me as a student. Throughout my graduate career, I wrestled with my identity, living in a world that I both was and was not a part of. While some looked at me and saw a proud Latina, others looked at me and saw someone putting on a minority mask so that I could “stand out.” I was lucky to have advisors throughout my career who encouraged and supported me in whomever I chose to be. Nevertheless, I was still aware that feminist theologians and Latinx theologians were somehow on the periphery, less important than the “real” theologians, which is what is implied when qualifiers are placed on every kind of theologian except the ones who study the work of old or dead white men. I went on the job market as I finished my PhD, and, in one interview, my Honduran background came up. In that interview I was told by a very kind and well-meaning person, “Oh we have many Honduran students. And they’re really smart!” I left the interview, called my mother, and told her what happened. She joked with me saying, “Oh, smart Hondurans?” We still joke with each other, “But there are smart Hondurans!” whenever we do something dumb. The person in the interview meant to be complimentary. What came out was the need to highlight that even Honduran students can be smart. The statement came from an implicit bias that buys into stereotypes even while overtly rejecting them. The statement came from the dominant

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narratives of society that marginalizes people. What was said was “and they’re really smart.” What was implied was, “despite the general perception of Hondurans as not capable, the students we have are quite capable.” In the moment I laughed, despite feeling decidedly uncomfortable. By this time, I had been around enough implicit bias to be able to feel it, even in the kindest of people. That shock of my sixteen-year-old self returned. I was in an interview situation, trying to prove my capability, and yet here was an off-handed comment that made me question that capability all over again. Such comments are deeply rooted in cultural narratives that white Americans have been telling for centuries. A couple of years later I was with my mother in an antique shop, and we ran across an old children’s Bible from the 1950s. In it was a story, with pictures, about how Jesus loved all the children in the world. It was not based on the children’s song heard in churches. Instead, it listed children from all over the world and gave each “type” of child characteristics, including the line, “Jesus even loves the little brown babies rolling in the dirt.” We laughed. It, too, has become a running joke with my mother and my closest friends. I am from Minnesota, after all. And we are polite. Laughter is the response, because righteous indignation gets you nowhere. We fit in. We connect to the larger social narratives so that life runs smoothly and our life makes sense. It gives a feeling of competence even when underneath it is a lurking feeling of disunity and apodicticity These moments reveal the disparity between how I think of myself and how I receive myself as understood by larger narratives. It is not, in fact, funny. It is an instance of structural discrimination in the narrative of the United States. As a very light-skinned Latina with a Minnesota accent, I can wear that narrative of fitting into a very white world and its accompanying privilege like a security blanket. But: the safety it provides is also a lie. I am more than this. Over time, the lie becomes a burden. Most days I feel unseen for who I really am. I know the narratives constructed around me by others do not capture who I am. Most people do not see the Latina. That hiddenness wears me down. I find myself defending the wholeness of myself to others as they contest whether or not I have a right to the label, “Latina.” The competent self is contested even in my ability to be the embodied self I am with the multiple elements I contain. And this struggle is one I not only see in myself. It is also present in some of my students, and I see myself in a particularly appropriate place to help them through. If I can be a multiplicity that is also a capable subject, that adds to the pedagogical environment. If I incorporate the struggle into the class experience through readings, assignments, discussions, even lecture content, they see the authority in the front of the room tell them two important things: (1) it is okay to be more than the narrative others have of

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you, and (2) it is okay to struggle with what that means for who you are. We both interpret preexisting narratives and write our own at the same time. That is the role of pedagogical hermeneutics. My experiences as a student and then becoming a professional have pushed me to find a greater recognition of others and myself. The longer I have taught, the more I have seen my students wrestle with questions of identity. Engaging with my students summoned me to realize that my own narrative identity needed to match the truth of me more closely. My students need me to be someone who does not fit neatly into dominant social narratives, who wrestles with that distanciation, and who finds new belonging in alternative narratives. I can recite from memory the major ethical theories of the West from virtue to rights ethics, and hit all of the major thinkers. However, my students are rarely impressed by that. What they want to know is the application. How are these narratives shaping their own, and can they challenge them when those narratives create disunity in their own self-understanding. They need to hear the narratives on the margins and to watch me grapple with them in order to learn where their own narratives need to be contested and where they need to be built up by recognition of being capable. Being a teacher, especially in a humanities classroom, is about being a presence, an authentic self who recognizes the authenticity and capability of those in my classes. As I engage in self-reflection, I model this process for them and create a narrative that summons them to be themselves, resisting the evil of oppressive metanarratives in thought, feeling, and action.13 To be a teacher is to awaken in others and myself a sense of who we are, and to create an environment in which that becomes possible. The need to give epistemological privilege to marginalized narratives became more pressing in 2019. The U.S. government started taking children from their parents and putting them in detention centers. Those children were Honduran. The human rights violations are astonishing, but these are not just any humans. These are my people. I looked at my classrooms with all of my Honduran, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan students. I then looked at the makeup of the faculty, administrators, and staff at my institution. I realized that my internal struggles with identity and belonging were not just academic. I began using my middle name, the best marker I have of my identity, to resist the domination of my very German last name. To whom would my students look to be themselves rather than cogs in an assimilation machine if not to me? Living in the liminal space of being and not being a person of color, of knowing and not knowing who you are, of being seen and not being seen, is a difficult world to inhabit. It has made me apologetic about seeming selfrighteously to claim status as a person of color while at the same time being angry that people do not see me for who I really am. It is exhausting to have to defend an identity to friends and strangers who “don’t see you that way”

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while at the same time dealing with the guilt of not having visible solidarity with those with whom you identify, and who need you and whatever voice you have to speak for and with them. The longer I teach, the more aware I become of my own liminality and lack of confidence in who I am. That has allowed me also to see that struggle more clearly in my students. In facing social narratives both in the classroom and in the world as I connect my classes to current events, I am summoned to be myself. As my students call me into myself, I in turn seek to provide them opportunities to be called into themselves, by knowing that they have been seen. How do I help them be seen? How, in the process of me claiming my identity, do I help them claim theirs without having to be the symbols of the oppressed? 3. TEACHING BECOMING THROUGH HEARING AND WRITING The process of recognition and summoning of the self is particularly important for students whose identities have been devalued by larger cultural narratives. The readings chosen and assignments given often reflect the educational background of the instructor. In Religious Studies, that training has often been through the “classical” thinkers of the field from Plato and Augustine to Schleiermacher, Bonhoeffer, and Taylor. These voices are important. They have shaped religious thinking in the West. However, these thinkers are not known for their ability to represent the perspectives of everyone. They represent an imagined “everyone” that really includes those trained in this trajectory of thought. Humanities instructors are increasingly seeking out the voices of the marginalized in order to be more representative of broader human experience and thinking. But the process requires significant searching, and the result is students are then not trained in the classics. One has to weigh which path will be more important. Representation matters, because, as Ricoeur noted, what we read becomes a part of us. If the things one reads speak to diverse experiences, they become a path of both recognizing and legitimizing alternative voices. The authority of the instructor gives value and authority to the diverse voices in the class through content and presentation of it. Developing a pedagogical hermeneutic means interpreting the layered narratives of the classroom in light of the desire to bring students and teacher to themselves, to see and be seen for who they are. Ricoeur’s claim that we are summoned to ourselves by narrative can translate from the biblical narratives he engages to the layered societal, institutional, and individual narratives that make up the humanities classroom. In reflecting on the “Master-disciple” relationship, Ricoeur says,

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it is the inner person that discovers the truth in oneself, simply aided by the teacher. As for the signs of language, they merely serve to “alert” this person in the moment they are “consulted.” It is, however, the truth of things that “presides” and thus “governs” the mind itself from within.14

Because I value forming ethical teacher-student relationships, I discourage my students from taking on my narrative. I present my story in light of the layered stories of the pedagogical environment, the classroom, in order to prompt (summon) students to awaken their own self-reflective capabilities. The symbol, as Ricoeur says, gives rise to thought. But what are these symbols? Labels are difficult. The current term used to refer to the nonwhite population of the United States is “people of color.” This gives rise to thinking about why the term exists at all. The process of colonization—in its political, social, economic, intellectual, educational, and legal forms—gave rise to the need for terminology that refigures and recognizes the colonized. Karen Buenavista Hanna, in describing the decolonized classroom, encourages the use of “pedagogies in the flesh.” She means pedagogies that take seriously the embodied experiences of the teachers and students. She says, I use the term “people of color” as both a political identity and a descriptor of those who are racialized in the United States as non-white. I use it with an understanding that many people of mixed ancestry are racialized in ways that sometimes allow them access to white privilege, yet at the same time they may experience psychic and material violence as they relate to the institutionalized intersections of racism, classism, and heteropatriarchy.15

Buenavista Hanna brings to light the feeling of liminality created by the categories we make for people. However, she is not the only one to challenge the language of “People of Color.” In When Colorblindness Isn’t The Answer: Humanism and the Challenge of Race, Anthony Pinn also challenges the language as perpetuating the narrative that whiteness is the standard and everyone else is other.16 These narratives, despite the good intentions behind the use of the language, often serve further to distort students’ understanding of themselves. The words summon narratives in which students see themselves as both American and not American, belonging and not belonging. Both Buenavista Hanna and Pinn offer tools for decolonizing classrooms and organizations through shifts in the narratives that determine what is “standard.” Narratives that support privilege, either overtly or unintentionally, do so by universalizing a particular way of thinking, feeling, and acting as standard, universal, and correct. Added to this is a layer of polarity that comes to symbolize correctness. For example, a story that privileges “whiteness”

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and “blackness” as poles of understanding cannot take into account the liminality of “brownness.” Moreover, these categories are layered into social narratives where to be “white-like” is to gain certain privileges, while to be more “black-like” is to not have them.17 Part of the privilege at stake is having access to the framework of the story, in which polarities are important. Brownness is difficult to hear in a black and white world. To be brown is to not fit neatly into the categories of the dominant narrative. As a result, to be brown can come with not only all of the marginalization but also a kind of invisibility. One sees similar invisibility for those who identify as gender neutral or nonbinary in a binary world. Even our language for our narratives is polarized. Those who do not fit clearly into privileged or not-privileged are hard to see. The levels of recognition where the understanding of self reflects the reality of the embodied self and the narratives that shape both experience and understanding call for transcontextual narratives. A transcontextual narrative is the creation of liminal space for the diversity that we are, both individually and collectively. The transcontextual narrative is an attempt to move away from the need for metanarrative. In this context, the transcontextual narrative is the recognition of liminality and a way of giving students permission to live in that liminality by exploring their own narratives in light of a multitude of potential social narratives. In the process, they not only write their own but also contribute to the process of breaking apart an arbitrary social narrative that has fenced them and others in. The transcontextual narrative is meant to be fluid. A frame is created as a meeting point of ideas. It allows the individual to move toward a unified-diversified self through recognition of the capableness of each subject. As Marissa Lopez points out, “Race might not be a transcendent category of truth, in other words, but it is, I argue, a category of physical affective experience that catalyzes personal and political change in the world.”18 Race, gender, neurological status, and the multitude of diversities that we are as categories of emotional experience in an embodied life cannot be ignored. The transcontextual narrative can draw on given language to re-cognize self and other in the liminal space of not fitting neatly into metanarratives. If narratives summon the self, then the challenge of pedagogy is to create the classroom environment that allows the students to be seen for who they are in their wholeness, not just their cognitive selves. A pedagogy that prioritizes transcontextual narratives more readily resists lapsing into metanarratives. Metanarratives that prioritize whiteness or “Americanness” in ways that assume these as normal or “given” reasserts this privilege within a classroom. But what they also privilege is a kind of unified self that does not embody diversity. A metanarrative cannot account for all of the little narratives. It is too rigid, and it promotes a false self as a desirable, uniform

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standard. Embodied reality is not so rigid. Kayko Driedger Hesslein, in challenging Paul Tillich’s notion of ultimate reality, explores the depths of our embodiment. She states, Multiply-constituted bodies have been the subject of theorization by those working in the field of multiculturalism. Rita Dhamoon proposes that the multiple particularities of one individual do not function in an “additive” manner, whereby characteristics add up to a multiply-hyphenated description of an individual, but rather multiple particularities are interdependent, existing in a matrix, creating an integrated person through a process more akin to multiplication than addition.19

Her concern is with the layered matrix that is embodied life, where the layers may, at least on the surface, appear contradictory—for example, to be simultaneously Jewish and Christian. The multiply self is the liminal self, living in a matrix of narratives in one’s embodiedness. Negotiating classroom space has summoned a teaching self that understands that these questions are of primary importance. As an ethics teacher, this means being aware that designing a class that draws all ethical theory from “major Enlightenment thinkers” privileges uniformity and singularity as a universal principle for human being and flourishing and reinforces a problematic metanarrative. Such a unified narrative enhances marginalization and colonization of the classroom. All of this self-reflection has led me to try to teach students to listen for narratives that embrace “multiply-constituted bodies,” which create avenues for becoming. As an example of how to carry this narrative embodiment forward, Tyler Atkinson looks to the use of Tupac Shakur’s body, through tattoos and cover art, as opening new forms of religious symbol. These symbols highlight marginalization and outsider status, while transcending that status by connecting into dominant Christian symbols. New avenues of thinking, feeling, and acting are opened up in the teaching of such symbols in the classroom.20 What is needed, then, is a pathway for narrative to summon the self that does not create metanarrative but rather embraces little narratives as they intertwine and transform. CONCLUSION: THE ALWAYS PRESENT, NEVER FINISHED PEDAGOGICAL NARRATIVE In “The Task of Hermeneutics,” Ricoeur asked, “How is it possible to introduce a critical instance into a consciousness of belonging that is expressly defined by the rejection of distanciation?”21 The tension of proximity and

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distance—between past and present, self and other—makes possible communication at a distance between two differently situated consciousnesses. In this work, Ricoeur offers a way to think about pedagogical hermeneutics as a path from shock to transcontextual narrative. The narrative arc of becoming oneself moves from an early sense of the unity of self, to disunity through recognition of the apodicticity of one’s narratives in relation to the larger social narrative, and then to a reintegration of self in a narrative that embraces diversity and becoming rather than simply being. While the shock of my younger years often came through experiences of discrimination or reduction of myself by others to my bodily appearance, it did provide me insight into the ways my narrative did not fit neatly into the larger societal narratives, no matter how much I may have wanted that. Anderson’s reflections on feminism and Ricoeur at the beginning of this essay lay a framework for the process of being seen as a capable self. The later reflections on gender and race/ethnicity throughout the essay extend that sense of the multiplicity of being. The pedagogical process can provide opportunities for shock that allows students to question not only how they fit into societal norms but also the validity of those normative narratives. A transcontextual narrative that thrives in the liminality of being can provide a framework for self-critique that legitimizes both the process and the outcome. While human beings may resist distanciation, one could argue that this resistance comes out of the dominance of privilege in all its forms demanding conformity in order to be recognized as competent. When one lays this framework over the pedagogical environment, it may mean creating courses that emphasize the creative acts of discussion and writing as essential elements of becoming oneself. Human beings are dialogical. We have embodied selves, the selves we think we are that we put into narratives, and the selves that are reflected back on us by the gaze of others. Creating courses that allow for a guided negotiation of that dialogue can open up opportunities for shock that is productive, moving one toward transcontextual narratives of self. According to Ricoeur, discourse is work. It is always connected to someone particular. The person individuates herself in producing individual works.22 Because we engage in discourse as we see, speak, and hear, our experiences become a personal discourse open to analysis and interpretation and we are summoned into ourselves. What I bring to my classroom is an identity grounded in a transcontextual narrative. The liminal space of being and not being Latina means that I bridge these realities. I perform my identity authentically when I create space for recognition as a regaining of confidence in others and myself. To ignore difference in the classroom destroys the confidence of the student. The colorblind principle, like other attempts to “not see difference” erases identity, denying the value of difference in order to force everyone into the dominant

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role or risk complete marginalization. Can I, in my embodiment, become a performative identity of transcontextual space? Will this allow students to reframe their identities, seeing and being seen as their authentic and hybrid, multiply selves? My research and experience have provided me with several tools: The first tool is recognition. Recognition is when I see and hear students, and allow them to see and hear themselves in both my narrative identity and the ways I open up theirs. All of my classes, not just ethics, summon me to empower my students by recognizing their competence.23 Confidence is regained in recognition. By that regaining of confidence, the self is not only summoned but also grows. To be recognized as competent creates a narrative that summons the competent self. The second tool is space. Hoffman et al. studied space created at the University of Minnesota for students of color. They argue that there are two primary types of space, assimilative spaces and subversive spaces, which can both harm and enhance the experience of students of color. Assimilative spaces provide opportunities for engagement with the larger community. However, because their function is to assimilate, these spaces can introduce narratives that devalue difference and thus do harm to those who occupy them. Subversive spaces are more often found in departments and courses that focus on the experience of particular groups.24 Such spaces can provide students with opportunities to engage with their identity as (for example) a student of color through the subversive narrative of “my people.” Because most subversive spaces arise in departments and courses, faculty need to be intentional in choices about course material. Rather than “the old masters” it is possible there is greater value to be had in privileging previously marginalized voices, where the course material itself in authors, assignments, and themes, reflects the diversity of actual life in the United States. Self-reflection is a third tool. Following Buenavista Hanna and engaging Ricoeur again, self-reflection is essential for transcontextual narratives that summons the being of the instructor and the students. To be reflexive in our thinking is to be aware of whole selves and how we inhabit, imagine, and run a classroom. We need to pay attention to how social metanarratives have shaped the loss of confidence and competence and thereby caused our students to misunderstand themselves. Summoned into this context, the pedagogical subject can then reflect on how we ourselves have appropriated those narratives in how we build and run a class.25 In awareness of our own transcontextual being, we need to be reflective on how that will shape the being of our students as we ask them through discourse and writing to interpret the narratives we unfold and engage their own.

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NOTES 1. Paul Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 29–38. 2. Oliver Mallet and Robert Wapshott, “The Challenges of Identity Work: Developing Ricoeurian Narrative Identity in Organizations,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organizations 11, no. 3 (2011): 272. 3. Paul Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” in From Text to Action, 83. 4. Pamela Sue Anderson, “Lost Confidence and Human Capability: A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Gendered, yet Capable Subject,” Text Matters 4, no. 4 (2014): 32. 5. Anderson, “Lost Confidence,” 33. 6. Anderson, “Lost Confidence,” 39. 7. Paul Ricoeur, “The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 262. 8. Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: II,” in The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 328. 9. Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 241. 10. Anderson, “Lost Confidence,” 38. 11. Paul Ricoeur, “Toward a Narrative Theology: Its Necessity, Its Resources, Its Difficulties,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 241. 12. Gabrielle Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., eds., Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2012). 13. Paul Ricoeur, “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 260. 14. Ricoeur, “Summoned Subject,” 269. 15. Karen Buenavista Hanna, “Pedagogies in the Flesh: Building an AntiRacist Decolonized Classroom,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 40, no. 1 (2019): 233. 16. Anthony B. Pinn, When Colorblindness Isn’t the Answer: Humanism and the Challenge of Race (Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2017), 83. 17. Zeus Leonardo, “The Race for Class: Reflections on a Critical Raceclass Theory of Education,” Educational Studies 48 (2012): 431–432. 18. Marissa Lopez, “Border Bodies: Dagoberto Gilb’s Phenomenology of Race,” Contemporary Literature 56, no. 4 (2015): 604.

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19. Kayko Driedger Hesslein, “Multiplicity and Ultimate Concern(s),” in The Body and Ultimate Concern: Reflections on an Embodied Theology of Paul Tillich, ed. Adam Pryor and Devan Stahl (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2018), 47. 20. Tyler Atkinson, “Tell Me I Ain’t God’s Son: Reading Tupac’s Stigmatized Body as a Religious Symbol,” in The Body and Ultimate Concern: Reflections on an Embodied Theology of Paul Tillich, ed. Adam Pryor and Devan Stahl (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2018), 120. 21. Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” 73. 22. Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” 82. 23. Christina Lazzarie and Alain Caille, “Recognition Today: The Theoretical, Ethical and Political Stakes of the Concept,” Critical Horizons 7, no. 1 (2006): 69. 24. Garrett D. Hoffman et al., “Assimilation and Subversion on Campus: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Students’ Experiences of Race and Institutional Resources,” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 12, no. 3 (2019): 235–237. 25. Buenavista Hanna, “Pedagogies in the Flesh,” 235.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Pamela Sue. “Lost Confidence and Human Capability: a Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Gendered, yet Capable Subject.” Text Matters 4, no. 4 (2014): 31–52. Atkinson, Tyler. “Tell Me I Ain’t God’s Son: Reading Tupac’s Stigmatized Body as a Religious Symbol.” In The Body and Ultimate Concern: Reflections on an Embodied Theology of Paul Tillich. Edited by Adam Pryor and Devan Stahl, 95–124. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2018. Buenavista Hanna, Karen. “Pedagogies in the Flesh: Building an Anti-Racist Decolonized Classroom.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 40, no. 1 (2019): 229–244. Gutiérrez y Muhs, Gabrielle, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. Gonzalez, and Angela P. Harris, eds. Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2012. Hesslein, Kayko Driedger. “Multiplicity and Ultimate Concern(s).” In The Body and Ultimate Concern: Reflections on an Embodied Theology of Paul Tillich. Edited by Adam Pryor and Devan Stahl, 41–58. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2018. Hoffman, Garrett D., Fernando Rodriguez, May Yang, and Rebecca Robers-Huilman. “Assimilation and Subversion on Campus: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Students’ Experiences of Race and Institutional Resources.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 12, no. 3 (2019): 230–241. Lazzarie, Christina, and Alain Caille. “Recognition Today: The Theoretical, Ethical and Political Stakes of the Concept.” Critical Horizons 7, no. 1 (2006): 63–100. Leonardo, Zeus. “The Race for Class: Reflections on a Critical Raceclass Theory of Education.” Educational Studies 48 (2012): 427–449. Lopez, Marissa. “Border Bodies: Dagoberto Gilb’s Phenomenology of Race.” Contemporary Literature 56, no. 4 (2015): 601–633.

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Mallet, Oliver, and Robert Wapshott. “The Challenges of Identity Work: Developing Ricoeurian Narrative Identity in Organizations.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organizations 11, no. 3 (2011): 271–288. Pinn, Anthony B. When Colorblindness Isn’t the Answer: Humanism and the Challenge of Race. Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2017. Pryor, Adam, and Devan Stahl, eds. The Body and Ultimate Concern: Reflections on an Embodied Theology of Paul Tillich. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2018. Ricoeur, Paul. The Conflict of Interpretations. Edited by James M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974. ———. “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology.” In Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace, 249–261. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. ———. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. ———. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Edited by James M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. ———. “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: II.” In The Conflict of Interpretations. Edited by James M. Edie, 315–334. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974. ———. “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics.” In From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Edited by James M. Edie, 25–52. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. ———. “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology.” In The Conflict of Interpretation. Edited by James M. Edie, 236–266. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974. ———. “The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation.” In Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace, 262–275. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. ———. “The Task of Hermeneutics.” In From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Edited by James M. Edie, 53–74. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. ———. “Toward a Narrative Theology: Its Necessity, Its Resources, Its Difficulties.” In Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace, 236–248. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995.

Part 2

THE JUST UNIVERSITY AS A SOCIAL SPACE

Chapter 8

The Literary Self Nostalgia, Kenosis, and Interpretation toward a Renewed Vision and Possibility for the Liberal Arts Jeffrey F. Keuss

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them. . . . (I am large, I contain multitudes).1

In “Song of Myself,” we find Walt Whitman’s famous call to the reader to not sit passively before his poetry but to embrace the call of the poet and to cocreate with him. To read the poem is to be engaged in the act of poetry itself as a becoming. Whitman acknowledges the depth and complexity of identity that is found in the act of poiesis as he parenthetically muses (“I am large, I contain multitudes”). This is an accurate summation of the often destabilizing yet liberating experience many students find through the liberal arts. Challenged in classrooms with material and conversations that provoke the unsettling of preconceived views, the very sense of what constitutes the self is at once renewed, at times awakened and often provoked into spaces that Whitman terms “contradiction” of the self as it has been and might become. Yet who are these multitudes we find with the self through the liberal arts and how do we teach them? This chapter outlines three representative selves that students inhabit and present in classrooms—nostalgic, kenotic, and interpretative—as influential parts of the multitudes that constitute what I will term the “literary self.” The literary self is a constellation—a “concrete outcome of conjunction and renewal”—of the nostalgic, kenotic, and interpretative selves that present in differing ways throughout a student’s education. It is in concert with Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical project which extends the notion of textuality to all objectifications of human 163

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existence. A human life for Ricoeur is a quasi-text or a text analog; like a text, a life embodies meaning that can in principle be made explicit by means of interpretation. Since the late 1960s, Ricoeur’s writings focused on providing a detailed elaboration of the basic elements of a philosophical hermeneutics (a general theory of interpretation). Ricoeur wanted to devise a methodological means for thematizing or interpreting, that is, making explicit, the meaning of existence—what it means to be an acting human subject. In this regard, my chapter argues that a just university takes seriously education that acknowledges the textual narrative and nature of identity formation coupled with a call for faculty to pedagogically allow for such exploration of multitudes expressed and lived into. This holistic focus of the literary self found through reflecting and acting upon the textual nature of identity that Ricoeur provides is an alternative to the rational approaches to meaning-making brought forth by the Enlightenment and often enacted in the modern university. One of the primary polemics throughout Ricoeur’s oeuvre is his repudiation of the Cartesian rationalism that continues to shape the pedagogy of higher education and problematically prioritizes identity formation as a reasoned act prior to a vocational embodied repose. There is a fuller, diverse, embodied, “filled with multitudes” self at stake for Ricoeur, who argues that, more than “thought,” the authentic self is “called out.” Following Martin Heidegger, Ricoeur no longer identifies the self solely with the isolated subject. The self is larger than that of the cogito. The self “I am” is the context, not the mere equivalence, of the “I think,” the thinking thing. This is in concert with Ricoeur’s universal, evaluative conception of the subject’s identity as selfsame (ipse), that is, in terms of selfhood. He defines ipse-identity in relation to sameness (idem), as well as otherness (alterity). The method of truth appropriate to his account of selfhood is a form of “belief in . . .” or credence, which testifies to the very structure of being a self, both agent and patient, active and passive, same and other.2 What is at stake for selfhood is always the hope of honest retrieval of who we were meant to be, which Ricoeur originally described as a second naiveté: “We can . . . aim at a second naiveté in and through criticism. In short, it is by interpreting that we can hear again.”3 Universities who embrace a commitment to this literary self as they conceive the liberal arts are universities committed to justice, mercy, and humility. As a textual exercise in identity formation, the self is one that is already being “written” and “rewritten” in media res. Students come to us with the materials for Aristotle’s eudemonia—human flourishing—ready to be brought forth. Introducing students to the life of the literary self is an act of justice as it releases rather than limits their possibilities, imagination, and capacity for action in the hopes of human flourishing. James Baldwin put it this way in relation to the power of story in The Devil Finds Work:

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A story is impelled by the necessity to reveal: the aim of the story is revelation, which means that a story can have nothing—at least not deliberately—to hide. This also means that a story resolves nothing. The resolution of a story must occur in us, with what we make of the questions which the story leaves us.4

The literary self is one who is introduced to a life where they have nothing to hide nor a need to resolve beyond that which they themselves choose to in the name of justice. Students do not arrive in classrooms tabula rasa, but are filled with multitudes of selves that are at once reaching to their past (nostalgic), excavating and clearing space for new ways of being (kenotic), and preparing to re-member and interweave themselves in the community with others (interpretive) as a literary expression of being fully alive. This is the role of universities in the cultivation and care of the literary self, which is not an isolated self but a self in communion with others who are being called out in authenticity as ambassadors for hope and justice by writing and rewriting, being read and reading, in the presence of other authentic selves. In order to engage and cultivate the literary self, the university that is committed to justice will take up the task and responsibility of interpreting, reading, recalling, and revising texts—the concern and call of a robust general hermeneutics— that models and exemplifies the good life as one that is worth living in hope and justice before and with others. 1. THE NOSTALGIC SELF: “MY PENCILS OUTLAST THEIR ERASERS” Universities can recover a vision for what it means to educate our students for life beyond the subject matter of a course by foregrounding the role of general hermeneutics in liberal arts. This will additionally awaken students to the multitudes within themselves as the literary self, beginning with an acknowledgment of the place and power of nostalgia in identity formation as the nostalgic self. From his earliest work, Ricoeur focused on how human flourishing was ultimately a restoring act, a pulling together of disparate and broken shards of life and purpose into a purposeful whole: “we are in every way children of criticism, and we seek to go beyond criticism by means of a criticism that is no longer reductive, but restorative.”5 What is needed now more than ever is a return to not the cold shadow of higher education’s failings but a turn to the light and heat that is the promise of a liberal arts education: to offer a vital baseline for who we collectively aspire to be that turns and transforms communities toward the good work of human flourishing. This is truthful nostalgia that at once longs for home and acknowledges the price it will take to return and transform.

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“One is always at home in one’s past,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory—his autobiography of sorts which he calls a “systematic correlated assemblage of personal recollections.”6 Having provocatively said in Speak, Memory that “I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers,” Nabokov acknowledges that his life will always be one of recollection and revision as much as it will be one of novelty and new experiences. While some might find this act of constant revision troubling when it comes to notions of history and tradition, the continued act of revision and recollection is a necessary part of what education for the sake of justice requires. This feeling of being “at home in one’s past” is both the promise and plague of higher education at this moment in history. Nostalgia, the term we use to describe this longing for what has passed, comes from the Greek nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning pain. Nostos is the central theme of Homer’s Odyssey, the epic following the hero Odysseus as he seeks his way back home from battle in the Trojan War. Rather than being a hopeful framing device, the word “nostalgia” is an oft-derided and problematic term. This pain and longing for home are seen at times as a retreat from the harsh realities of the everyday. Yet the nostalgia that is a central player for Homer in The Odyssey and for Nabokov is of a different order than what some see as escapism or romanticism for past glories. For Nabokov, “the nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.”7 Like Odysseus, Nabokov acknowledges throughout his recollections, revisions, and rewriting of his life that in his lost childhood there exists some purpose and potential for who and what he is to be, whether as an artist or simply as a human being. Haunted by the loss of his father, this nostalgia is less an escapist retreat than it is a harsh accountability to who he is called to be. In a similar vein to Odysseus returning home to find that home is not what he remembered yet everything he will need to move forward with his life, this clear and truth-filled nostalgia is what higher education needs for such a time as this. In our modern culture, false nostalgia focused on the “sorrow for lost banknotes” in many respects has crowded out the truthful nostalgia for the “sense of lost childhood.” College campuses reflect this shift, which takes form as a diminished cultural value, economic uncertainty, and a move toward a transactional rather than transformational focus. Whether it is how students are choosing majors based on value propositions drawn from late capitalism, donor pressure placed on administrators to at once innovate yet retain tradition, and parents wondering aloud what the return on investment will be, the challenges to the identity of what constitutes a university are massive. It is difficult given these immediate and apocalyptic challenges to

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mission and focus to remember the questions of hope and justice that are foundational to the vocation of universities. Rather than cultivating and liberating the self to write and rewrite for the sake of freedom, hope, and justice, students have become trapped in the Ancient Mariner’s repetition of sameness, in tales evermore renewed “like night, from land to land” in some ever new “strange power of speech.”8 Increasingly, a “teaching for the test” pedagogy gives rise to more and more teaching assessment models that seek after what can be measured efficiently rather than what students are becoming. George Steiner foresaw this trend in his lecture on nostalgia where the political and philosophic history of the West during the past 150 years can be understood as a series of attempts—more or less conscious, more or less systematic, more or less violent—to fill [a] vacancy, this darkness in the middle, was one of “the death of God” . . . the decay . . . left in disorder, or had left blank, essential perceptions of social justice, of the meaning of human history, of the relations between mind and body, of the place of knowledge in our moral conduct.9

Steiner speaks of a boundless “nostalgia for the absolute,” in terms of its function: the major mythologies constructed in the West . . . are a kind of substitute theology. They are systems of belief and argument which may be savagely antireligious, which may postulate a world without God and may deny an afterlife, but whose structure, whose aspirations, whose claims on the believer, are profoundly religious in strategy and effect.10

This “nostalgia for the absolute” can drive us to circumvent what is truly at stake in recalling the lost childhood that Nabokov hungers for with a strangely areligious yet still fundamentalist foundation. Such nostalgias are for some elusive absolute, tha block out and distract from assessing what is truly worth remembering and reclaiming for the sake of human flourishing. What Steiner calls a “substitute theology” can arise in our classrooms to make sense of the chaos and unknowability of our current moment through an offering of certitude and disciplinary essentialism that closes off the true nostalgia that seeks wonder and purpose, open to mystery in reflecting and remembering the past from which we came with honesty and humility. This is not a call to dispense with the rigor of teaching the traditions born from the history of our disciplines. But true nostalgia is not a memory devoid of critique and revision. Jarsalov Pelikan has suggested the following distinction between “tradition” and “traditionalism”: “tradition is the ‘living faith of the

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dead’—traditionalism is ‘the dead faith of the living.’”11 What might have been held as a truth for one generation requires nostalgia that is more engaged with tradition as the “living faith of the dead” which speaks in new voices and seeks forgiveness for past wrongs as a truthful remembering. An example of this is seen in my freshman seminar course where I have had students read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s celebrated epistle to his son Between the World and Me as a space to identify how nostalgia plays a role in our identity formation. Coates exemplifies the tension found in a “nostalgia for the absolute” with his notion of “The Dream” that plagues our culture and continually frames race as an antithetical referent to the ideal life: I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.12

As I have had students engage their understanding of “The Dream” in class, it is telling how differently students remember the narrative that Coates describes in the quote above. Students of color describe looking in from the outside at such a recollection, like a fantasy meant for others. For white students to hear this is often a shock. How can this be? Why would this memory be considered painful when for them it is a memory of comfort? To engage the true nostalgia is to remember what is truly “lost” in Nabokov’s sense of things, which includes how memories of comfort and care may be painful and triggering for others. The nostalgic self that arises in the classrooms of the just university not only remembers their individual pasts but also deeply hears and engages with the conflicting memories and truths held by fellow nostalgic selves in the community with humility and patience. It is likely that the university that emerges after the COVID-19 pandemic will look back on the modern, industrial university that pumped out students for the past forty years in the same way that this modern university consoled itself in nostalgia for a more ancient space of intellectual discourse at odds with the far more bureaucratic daily tasks. As we all live into the exponential rise in loneliness and isolation that takes hold in a pandemic culture, it has been said that it is too nostalgic to reflect on the university. But perhaps this is the perfect time for some truthful nostalgia that points back to the “sense of lost childhood” and the purpose of higher education at its core.

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To move students into the space of recovering, a true nostalgia will mean honestly assessing how the canonical texts required for our courses continue to perpetuate Coates’s “The Dream” as a monolithic proposal of the good life and fully acknowledging how universities feed on this proposition.13 To acknowledge the role that true nostalgia plays day in and day out in all that we do in universities will mean lifting up the many diverse renderings of hope, possibility, and justice that speak to our past selves in our communities. Not everyone comes into our classrooms with a nostalgia of the good life as treehouses, Cub Scouts, and the taste of strawberry shortcake on their tongues as Coates states in Between the World and Me. Acknowledging this openly in our curriculum and teaching will require intellectual humility and courage to release ourselves from the false narratives of the past that seek to quiet diverse voices and experience. To release ourselves from such false narratives requires a further move of relinquishment and release which is a move of the nostalgic self into communion with what I term the kenotic self. 2. THE KENOTIC SELF: HOPEFUL ATHEISM AND MAKING SPACE FOR TRUTH Universities that are just institutions will create safe spaces for students to become and sustain their true selves. Yet in order to accomplish this, we will need to challenge false spaces and shelters that prevent justice in the healing and support of true selves that will need to occur. In my previous work,14 I have argued that modern subjectivity in the twenty-first century requires a humble calling to relinquish the gluttony of the expansive ego and seek after what I have called the kenotic self.15 While often seen primarily in Christian theology, kenosis can be seen as a hopeful and constructive synonym for a certain path of atheism in that it is a call to the emptying of privilege and power, providing a profoundly embodied capacity to name injustice and discrimination that often binds education to an entrenchment of traditionalism and ego-building.16 In his lecture “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” Paul Ricoeur intimates such a move when he argues that a certain type of “atheism clears the ground for a new faith, a faith for a postreligious age.”17 For Ricoeur, this is a hope-filled path that “does not exhaust itself in the negation and destruction of religion” entirely but holds to hope by “destroying the shelter offered by religion and liberating men from the taboos imposed by religion” in that “atheism clears the ground for a faith beyond accusation and consolation.”18 This “destroying the shelter” differs from forms of totalizing atheism that destroy everything in its wake. Favoring the projects of Nietzsche and Freud rather than that of English empiricism and French positivism, Ricoeur leans into the promise of a form of atheism that is “not limited to its destruction of

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the ‘moral God’ and its refutation of the archaic, fear-inspired form of religion.” Rather, Ricoeur sees the destroying of shelter that falsely shields the subject as opening “a new path of faith, though a path full of uncertainties and dangers” and can usher in the possibility of “an event appropriate for our time” that “would be at the same time primitive and postreligious.”19 Citing Heraclitus, Ricoeur holds that such a destroying of shelter in the refutation of the archaic and fear-inspired forms of religion help us not to focus on the mere systems and words that cloud meaning but the Logos behind all things, “When a word says something, when it discloses not only something of being but Being—as is the case with the word of the poet or thinker—we are confronted with what be called a ‘word-event’ . . . something is said of which I am not the origin, nor the owner.”20 Ricoeur’s identification of this call to atheism, therefore, offers a powerfully resonate synonym to kenosis in that subjectivity is always held and preserved and ultimately unbounded for the sake of something grander of which we are “not the origin, nor the owner.” To this end, to follow the path of the kenotic self after Ricoeur’s notion of atheism is to seek a deep understanding of emptying in line with the Christian understanding. It is to discover an identity that risks remaining opened to becoming filled after the “destroying of shelter” that had shielded us from new possibilities. Where the nostalgic self gathers and ruminates on the lost and perhaps forgotten aspects central to identity, the kenotic self relinquishes and makes space for new insights and relationships. Both are needed in communion with one another, yet they are often at odds as students seek mastery and control of material and of the self. In this regard, the kenotic self is an essential part of any educational journey into the literary self and offers a corrective view of subjectivity from that of mastery and control as the goal of a life. This is a readiness to be open to new ideas and relationships, to expand the conversation partners that constitute true community, it is a recognition and embrace of paradox and difference as partners in education rather than enemies. bell hooks makes this clear in Teaching to Transgress when she speaks about the ever-changing fluid reality of the classroom when it is committed to being a liberatory space that is engaged in true learning: “Engaged” is a great way to talk about liberatory classroom practice. It invites us always to be in the present, to remember that the classroom is never the same. Traditional ways of thinking about the classroom stress the opposite paradigm—that the classroom is always the same even when students are different. To me, the engaged classroom is always changing. Yet this notion of engagement threatens the institutionalized practices of domination. When the classroom is truly engaged, it’s dynamic. It’s fluid. It’s always changing.21

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The kenotic self is essential to what a liberative and engaged classroom offers. To move away from “institutionalized practices of domination” and toward classrooms that are “truly engaged . . . dynamic . . . fluid” requires not only contexts that are “always changing” but also selves who are called upon to relinquish the desire for mastery and control. The call of the kenotic self is to lay down control for the sake of discovery, to relinquish mastery in favor of mystery, and to open one’s self to the hospitality of others. Another gift of the kenotic self is that it offers a calling to not privilege any of the manifold disciplines of the liberal arts and therefore makes space for religion to exist in critical conversation with other human sciences. As Ricoeur makes clear, his hopeful and constructive atheism makes possible for religion to be spoken of with humility in the midst of human sciences since it does away with privilege and power and certainty. One of the challenges of the modern university is to acknowledge the role that confessional religious practice plays not only in our curriculum but also in the lived experiences of students and faculty. If we are to have spaces of justice, mercy, and humility in the university, then the full lives of our students should be acknowledged and celebrated, which means religion is offered space not merely as a historical anecdote to culture but also as a core confessional reality for many. To relinquish power and privilege as the kenotic self in the classroom is to allow space for the full religious lives of students to be heard in manifold expressions as a theological reality of human flourishing. To follow Ricoeur’s argument as to the role of a hopeful atheism is not to quiet religious expression but to acknowledge the limits of any one expression without the communion of others in both critique and conviction. Brought into conversation and correlation with the manifold disciplines that constitute a university curriculum as heard in Ricoeur, a general hermeneutic focus that allows for the full expression of the self is a hospitable and just space to provoke opportunities for many voices to gather and discern what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful: this includes an acknowledgment of the theological and religious questions of humanism. To lean into a theological hermeneutic is helpful when approaching philosophical texts and ultimately the textual shape and sustaining of the self: it either interprets the explicit references to the infinite ground of thought and experience or makes explicit the implicit ultimate presupposition of the infinite ground that has not been made explicit by the author.22 As I have seen in my classes over the years, students desire to bring their whole selves into the classroom, but often it is only a partial self they are encouraged to voice. This resembles what bell hooks describes as “institutionalized practices of domination”: students who are Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Atheist, Christian, Agnostic or indifferent find that this partial self becomes totalized within a classroom conversation. As an alternative, the place of kenosis can be welcomed as a reminder to the manifold disciplines

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of the university to be hospitable hosts and guests and not a colonizing frame when presented as a kenotic emptying of privilege.23 At the heart of the kenotic self is focusing our attention on what it means to be human as one stands before what Paul Tillich states as humanity’s “ultimate concern” for and with each other. Here, the goal is not accumulation but excavation that makes space for wonder, illumination, and possibility of and prospect of deep connection. Here, the gathering together of that which is rightly remembered (nostalgic) and rightly excavated (kenotic) can be readied for education at its deepest and most vital. As the “multitudes” that constitute the self finds voice and harmony with others, it is then modeled and lived out in terms of self-limitation before other human agents who are afforded the space to be fully themselves. This is a hermeneutic repose where vulnerability rather than power and privilege is what is written and rewritten as the self makes more space for wisdom and truth. When brought into critical conversation with the nostalgic self, the kenotic self can assist in recovering a true nostalgia—a right and true recalling of what is vital, purposeful and grounding. Through recovering what Ricoeur terms our “second naiveté” in this way, our humanity is rightly ordered and embodied, ready to become human in all fullness and abandon. In addition to recovering the sense of self completed in relinquishment, rather than accumulation, what I am terming the “kenotic self” leads into the possibility of what Ricoeur has termed “interweaving” as one of the marks of just institutions by lifting up the interpretative self. 3. THE INTERPRETATIVE SELF: PAUL RICOEUR AND INTERWEAVING In his essay “What is a Text?” Ricoeur makes the claim “if reading is possible, it is indeed because the text is not closed in on itself but opens out onto other things. To read is, on any hypothesis, to conjoin a new discourse to the discourse of the text. This conjunction of discourses reveals, in the constitution of the text, an original capacity for renewal which is its open character. Interpretation is the concrete outcome of conjunction and renewal.”24 Ricoeur goes to say that “the interpretation of a text culminates in the selfinterpretation of a subject who thenceforth understands himself better, understands himself differently, or simply begins to understand himself.”25 What Ricoeur outlines here is the role that interpretation plays in finding meaning in not only the written text but also the textual life of the subject—what I am terming the “literary self.” By seeking meaning-making between a naïve and a critical interpretation, between a surface and a depth interpretation, then it seems possible to situate explanation and interpretation

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along a unique hermeneutical arc and to integrate the opposed attitudes of explanation and understanding within an overall conception of reading as the recovery of meaning.26

Put another way, as the “concrete outcome of conjunction and renewal,” the interpretative self forges a path betwixt the call of the kenotic self which is to relinquish, abandon, and empty one’s self without a need of return to a false past (a false as opposed to true nostalgia) in order to find solace in the multiplicity of embodied and literary sources that entangle the literary self for the sake of neighbor and human flourishing. Author Zadie Smith in Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction speaks of the power of fiction to awaken and enliven her sense of identity not as a singular fixed entity but an ever-changing, multifaceted, multivocal collective found both in embodied and in fictive relationships: It was on the basis of such flimsy emotional cues that I found myself feeling with these imaginary strangers: feeling with them, for them, alongside them and through them, extrapolating from my own emotions, which, though strikingly minor when compared to the high dramas of fiction, still bore some relation to them, as all human feelings do. The voices of characters joined the ranks of all the other voices inside me, serving to make the idea of my “own voice” indistinct. Or maybe it’s better to say: I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.27

To be interwoven in and with the “many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day” is what a Just University that fulfills its mission calls forth and embodies for its students. This is what Paul Ricoeur intimates in his essay “The Concept of Responsibility,” where he states that “the only way open to a conceptual surpassing of the metaphors of generation, mastery, and possession” found in institutions is to “pass through the clash of causalities and attempt a phenomenology of their interweaving.”28 The heritage of this literary entanglement and interweaving is foundational to the lost childhood of universities and evidence of what a just university is called to perform and embody. 4. WORDSWORTH’S THE PRELUDE AND COATES’S BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME AS SYMBIOSIS FOR THE LITERARY SELF This is the work of the interpretative self that is freed from false nostalgias and opened kenotically through the destroying of shelter that can block new

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interweavings of meaning. In the same freshman seminar where I introduced Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me I have introduced a reading of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude.29 For some, pairing Coates and Wordsworth might seem challenging. Yet both artists offer opportunities for students to find commonality and resourcing for identity formation as literary selves that help open new possibilities in each work. Throughout The Prelude, Wordsworth seeks to reconcile a sense of selfhood in relation to the res cogitans and res extensa. Wordsworth is searching the expanse of earth and heaven with a “mind turned in upon itself” to find a sense of identity and, ultimately, his calling. It is in Book 11 of The Prelude that Wordsworth sees that the search itself is ultimately his vocation in that the purged and opened self becomes ready to move beyond function and form and into meaning itself: “She, in the midst of all, preserved me still / A Poet, made me seek beneath that name, / And that alone, my office upon earth; / And, lastly, as hereafter will be shown.”30 The traditional office of poet is too limiting for his task and he is seeking “beneath that name” and aligning himself with “Poets, even as prophets, each with each / Connected in a mighty scheme of truth, / Have each for his peculiar faculty, / Heaven’s gift, a sense that fits him to perceive / Objects unseen before.”31 The unifying force of reason “in her most exalted mood” (14.192) is the imagination of the poet. It is this “reason which indeed is reason” that balances the world res cogitans and res extensa. God only animates this world—the framing of this world is in the hands of poets as the literary selves who are writing and rewriting, interweaving and entangling themselves in vulnerability and abandon for that which moves beyond reason yet requires reasonable conversations with others. Wordsworth’s call to take up the role of the poet is also resonant with Coates’s challenge of the “Dream” in Between the World and Me and his ultimate call to his son which is to create for the sake of survival: That was a moment, a joyous moment, beyond the Dream—a moment imbued by a power more gorgeous that any voting rights bill. This power, this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet . . . black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors . . . they made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.32

When called upon to read these seemingly disparate works by Coates and Wordsworth through traditional genre and disciplinary lens, it becomes a form of segregation and strips both works of art of potential power. Yet when students are allowed to see and experience the “interweaving” as Ricoeur calls for when the textuality of lives and stories of what it means to create as

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Wordsworth calls for and to do this creation for the sake of a people as Coates announces, then what bell hooks describes as “institutionalized practices of domination” can be overcome in favor of a classroom community that is “truly engaged . . . dynamic . . . fluid . . . always changing.” Akin to Ricoeur’s notion of interpretation as the concrete outcome of conjunction and renewal, students are challenged to read and interpret seemingly disparate texts like those found in Coates and Wordsworth by seeing the common hurt, hunger, and hope for meaning and reconciliation within the self and the world. Like Between the World and Me, The Prelude represents a selfforming universe where the context within which the literary self is known (the fictive realm) is also that which she creates. Like Coates, Wordsworth’s journey in The Prelude is a journey of discovery. This is a discovery of self in the act of creating itself—a reflectivity of the literary self as the framer of subjectivity and context where authentic subjectivity resides. It is a universe that is framed and “history brought to its appointed close.” This universe is made possible through the self-emptying of privilege and control by the creating writer as a sanctuary for her vision—a place where “a work that shall endure” can be maintained in hope and justice, yet always open to new voices. As we move through interpretation, it becomes possible to approach life beyond textuality and live into the literary self. As Ricoeur states, the text is not without reference; the task of reading, qua interpretation, will be to fulfill the reference. The suspense which defers the references merely leaves the text, as it were, “in the air,” outside or without a world. In virtue of this obliteration of the relation to the world each text is free to enter into relation with all the other texts which come to take the place of the circumstantial reality referred to by living speech. This relation of text to text, within the effacement of the world about which we speak, engenders the quasi world of texts or literature.33

This grand freedom of the text to “enter into relation with all the other texts” is what is at stake as we help students to move beyond a mere catalog of tomes and resource citations and into the communion of voices singing together as literature. Ricoeur uses the analogy of moving from merely reading a score to playing music in order to exemplify this shift: “Reading is like the execution of a musical score; it marks the realization, the enactment, of the semantic possibilities of the text.”34 As we have our students move into the literary work of reading and writing, we are also asking them to hopefully interweave with others in the freedom of conjunction and renewal as interpreters of texts and their very lives as literary selves open to freely relate to others. Freed from false nostalgias. Freed through the kenotic openness of excavation to make space for others. Freed to interpret and interweave without fear or diminishment of agency.

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5. THE INTERWOVEN HORIZON Education at its most deconstructive often results in what Ricoeur has called in Oneself as Another a “shattered cogito.”35 Rather than education as totalizing destruction resulting in a shattered cogito, the destroying of false shelters that Ricoeur proposes is a hermeneutics for the sake of authentic selfhood that acknowledges the “wounded cogito” in the world that needs healing and reconciliation. This wounded cogito is resonant with the “lost childhood” of the nostalgic self that needs to be heard and listened to. This is healing for the wounded cogito that is offered by the call of kenosis in emptying privilege and power for the hope and justice of the self as one enters our classroom as someone honest and vulnerable and ready to attest to his or her own existence and acting in the world. This is ultimately the literary self at her core, a self that acts through the hermeneutics of remembering (nostalgia), releasing (kenosis), and interpretation in the writing and rewriting of life in both agency and accountable responsibility for her actions in communion with others. Recalling Wordsworth’s vision coupled with a call to diversity and justice in line with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Zadie Smith is to see a literary self as the interwoven horizon we are called to tether our sense of subjectivity to through interpretation and therefore into life as the literary self with the many diverse voices of the past, the present, and the future. This work requires the emptying of presumption and pretext by embodying the kenotic self in order that an adequately expansive and hospitable space is cleared and soil is prepared (Kunstlehre) for the many voices that will come out of the hedgerows and byways unforeseen and unexpected in the concert that is a liberal arts education. This is the vision we find in Paul Ricoeur’s corpus that has provided an alternative to the rational approaches to homogeneous and fixed subjectivity in the Enlightenment and is the hope of higher education to be found in the Just University. As previously stated, Ricoeur’s primary challenge throughout his large body of work is his repudiation of Cartesian rationalism that continues to shape the pedagogy of higher education giving priority to identity as first a reasoned act prior to a vocational repose—more than “thought,” the authentic self is “called out.” In the terms of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology, all reflection must also “become interpretation of the meaning of the text.”36 The literary self has as her goal to understand the text—as read and lived—in all its entanglements and ultimately to achieve “enlarged thought,” that is, to expand the conscious horizons of the readers for the sake of others. This notion of the self as becoming more spacious and interwoven with and for the sake of others in part derives for Ricoeur from Kant’s principle of “enlarged mentality,” that is, to take the standpoint of everyone else. This is one of the maxims of autonomous thinking found in Kant’s Critique of

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Judgement which can be read in terms of practical reason.37 This more spacious and interwoven authentic self takes other “readers”/selves into account by presenting a more complex self—one that is at home with paradox and differing points of view—and thereby accounting for others as having similarly complex selves. This requires a perpetual rhythm and discipline provided by a community such as the Just University to recall the self in a true nostalgic remembering to write and rewrite both the evacuation of the self from the kenotic (not gripping to one point of view) and the interweaving of the interpretive self (to follow many threads) in order to act in the world in a responsible fashion, accounting for the actions of the self within the context of the world. As previously mentioned, the literary self as I have outlined is concerned not with a fixed and homogenous identity but living in and with the “many voices” of the other underscored by freedom. Ricoeur describes the important and vital role that freedom must play in the allowing of others to populate and purpose selfhood. He describes “the other of freedom” in the figure of the law, “the other of feeling” in the figure of respect, and “the other of the good” in the figure with a penchant for evil. Basically, Ricoeur reworks the relationship of autonomy to heteronomy or otherness (alterity) at the very core of selfhood (ipseity).38 For the literary self, sustained and commissioned with and for the care and concern of neighbor, this aligns with Ricoeur’s attestation to affirm the intimate relation of ipse-autonomy to otherness.39 Only after moving from the category of totality and homogeneity in the honest interrogation of the nostalgic, kenotic, and interpretative self, which for Ricoeur is represented by the complexities of singular situations in a community of persons treated as ends-in-themselves, can a hermeneutics of selfhood attest to the otherness at the heart of self-sameness as the literary self. In short, it is crucially in the face of the other—one’s neighbor as oneself—that he asserts the principle of autonomy as an imperative with an ethical, political, and aesthetic sense as a spacious and hospitable subject. Here Ricoeur reclaims autonomy especially from its distortions and disclaimers by the “post-age” of moral relativism. This is an age that celebrates concrete identities but assumes that the universal (or general) standpoint of autonomy represents an unfree reason. Ricoeur’s conception is original in affirming “an autonomy that is of a piece with the rule of reciprocity and the rule of justice [but] not a self-sufficient autonomy.”40 This rule of reciprocity “stands out against the background of the presupposition of an initial dissymmetry.”41 When one person is in the position of agent and the other is in the position of patient, then there is an asymmetrical reciprocity. Thus, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics attests to a self who as both agent and patient is intimately related to the other. To restate in terms of this chapter, if the kenotic is patient (able to hear by emptying the self of privilege and power), and

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the interpretative is agent (weaving together what is heard through writing and rewriting), then this is the self that edits both of those situations relative to another in a similar/complex mode. While autonomy in its strong, moral sense implies responsible judgment, Ricoeur stresses that this also necessarily involves autonomy in the spheres of reciprocity and of justice, rendering its political sense. To return to Walt Whitman, it is here as the literary self freed to the “multitudes” that inhabit and call out to others—texts in communion that become literature and therefore literary in movement and purpose—can the hope and promise of the liberal arts find its vocation in the Just University. NOTES 1. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass: Inscriptions 1891–92, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), 123. 2. For discussion of his method of “attestation,” see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself As Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 21–23, 298–302; and Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 24. 3. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 351, emphasis original. 4. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Vintage International, 2011), 46. 5. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 350. 6. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York, NY: Vintage Reissue, 2011), 116. 7. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 73. 8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., vol. 2 Edited by M. H. Abrams. (London: Norton, 1993), 345. 9. George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1974), 1, 2. 10. Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute, 4, italics mine. 11. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lectures on the Humanities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 62. 12. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 11. 13. While it is wearisome to enter the rhetorical sandstorms that billow and blow around the topic of “why the university?” in contemporary discourse, the claim that universities inhabit a necessary place in the social imaginary as the locus of social mobility, breakthroughs in scientific and humanitarian insight, deep human flourishing and awakening of compassionate communitarian concern is worth fighting for. This place, these people, this history of ideas and discovery still haunts the corners of our sense of human possibility and progress in the collective hope for a better way of life for all people in our more idealistic moments. Yet the shadow of financial excess, broken intellectual promises, fear of global viruses and disease we cannot control, and

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cloistered ignorance to the cries for justice falls heavily upon both the living and the dead that make up the history of higher education to this day. 14. See Jeffrey F. Keuss, Freedom of the Self: Cultural Identity and Mission at the Crossroads (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010). 15. My use of “self” through this chapter will be grounded primarily in what in the philosophical tradition is termed “subjectivity” and in some theological traditions is termed “theological anthropology.” 16. “Kenosis” is a Greek term taken from Phil. 2:7, where Christ is spoken of as having “emptied himself” (NRSV) as the true mark of what constitutes humanity. There has been much discussion about this entire crucial passage (Phil. 2:6–11), and several interpretations exist today. The scholarship surrounding the exegetical history of the Carmen Christi of Philippians 2 is expansive. Recent texts that have particularly informed this study are C. Stephen Evans’ recent edited volume Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self Emptying of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Michael Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), and Kevin Cronin Kenosis: Emptying Self and the Path of Christian Service (London: Continuum, 2005). 17. Paul Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” in Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 59. 18. Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” 60. 19. Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” 69. 20. Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” 71. 21. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 158, emphasis original. 22. For example, offering a theological hermeneutic of literary texts has three possibilities. First, it can interpret literary elements such as plot structure for its reference to the infinite ground of all meaning. Second, it can interpret significant symbols which stand for the element of the infinite ground within the manifest structure of the plot. Third, it can interpret the ways that specific linguistic symbols or figures of speech combine with structural elements to produce thought of the infinite depth of the text. 23. From one angle it can be seen as an attempt to give conceptual substance to the great hymn of Charles Wesley that speaks in awe that the Son would “empty himself of all but love” and die for a fallen humanity. From another angle kenotic theology represents an attempt to give a central place to the exemplar of Jesus’ limited yet sinless humanity while affirming that the ultimate significance of that humanity was and is that here on earth in the celebration of the truth that God the eternal Son has come, truly come, to redeem as Emmanuel—God with us. Figures such as Gottfried Thomasius (1802–75), A. M. Fairbairn in The Place of Christ in Modern Theology (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1894), Charles Gore in his Bampton Lectures, The Incarnation of the Son of God (London: John Murray, 1903), A. E. Garvie in Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus (reprint ed., London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1907), and Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth in his Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909;

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London: Kessinger, 2010) represent just some of the key figures in developing kenotic theology in the beginning of the modern period. 24. Paul Ricoeur, “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,” in Mario J. Valdes, ed., A Paul Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 57, emphasis mine. 25. Ricoeur, “What is a Text?” 57. 26. Ricoeur, “What is a Text?” 60. 27. Zadie Smith, “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” The New York Review of Books, October 24, 2019, accessed March 20, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyb​​ooks.​​ com​/a​​rticl​​es​/20​​19​/10​​/24​/z​​adie-​​smith​​-in​-d​​efe​ns​​e​-of-​​ficti​​on/. 28. Ricoeur, The Just, 23. 29. My remarks are centered on the 1850 edition of Prelude which had a much larger reading than the 1805 edition. 30. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts 1798, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. John Wordsworth (London: Penguin Classics, 1995), 455. 31. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 505. 32. Coates, Between the World, 149. 33. Ricoeur, “What is a Text?” 47, emphasis original. 34. Ricoeur, “What is a Text?” 58. 35. Ricoeur, Oneself As Another, 11. 36. John B. Thompson, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18. 37. Paul Ricoeur, “Appropriation,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 182–193; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 150–154 (no. 40). 38. In one of the excluded section from his Gifford Lectures titled “The Summoned Subject,” Ricoeur gives an instance of a radical otherness at the heart of selfhood: “the autonomy of the Kantian conscience is tempered by the confession of nonmastery over oneself that characterizes what is however a radical instance properly speaking, one that, to use Heidegger’s powerful expression, is always mine.” Ricoeur, “The Summoned Subject,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 272; cf. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 352–355. 39. See note 38. 40. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 275, emphasis original; also 274–276. 41. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 219–221.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baldwin, James. The Devil Finds Work. New York: Vintage International, 2011. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., vol. 2, 330–346. Edited by M. H. Abrams. London: Norton, 1993. Cronin, Kevin. Kenosis: Emptying Self and the Path of Christian Service. London: Continuum, 2005. Evans, C. Stephen, ed. Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self Emptying of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Fairbairn, A. M. The Place of Christ in Modern Theology. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1894. Forsyth, P. T. Person and Place of Jesus Christ. 1909. London: Kessinger, 2010. Garvie, A. E. Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus, reprint ed. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1907. Gore, Charles. The Incarnation of the Son of God: The Bampton Lectures. London: John Murray, 1903. Gorman, Michael. Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Soteriology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952. Keuss, Jeffrey F. Freedom of the Self: Cultural Identity and Mission at the Crossroads. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010. MacIntyre, Alasdair, and Paul Ricoeur. The Religious Significance of Atheism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Vintage Reissue, 2011. Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lectures on the Humanities. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Ricoeur, Paul. “Appropriation.” In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Edited and Translated by John B. Thompson, 182–193. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. ———. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Edited and Translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. Oneself As Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ———. “Religion, Atheism, and Faith.” In The Religious Significance of Atheism. Edited by Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, 59–79. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. ———. “The Summoned Subject.” In Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace, 262–277. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995.

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———. The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon, 1967. ———. “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding.” In A Paul Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Edited by Mario J. Valdes, 43–64. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Smith, Zadie. “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” The New York Review of Books, October 24, 2019. Accessed March 20, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyb​​ooks.​​com​ /a​​rticl​​es​/20​​19​/10​​/24​/z​​adie-​​smith​​-in​-d​​efen​s​​e​-of-​​ficti​​on/. Steiner, George. Nostalgia for The Absolute. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1974. Thompson, John B. “Editor’s Introduction.” In Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Edited and Translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Valdes, Mario J., ed. A Paul Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” In Leaves of Grass: Inscriptions 1891–92, 123. The Complete Poems. Edited by Francis Murphy. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: The Four Texts 1798, 1799, 1805, 1850. Edited by John Wordsworth. London: Penguin Classics, 1995.

Chapter 9

Teaching and Learning in Just Institutions A Ricoeurean Institutional Ethic of Higher Education Michael Le Chevallier

In 1848, educational pioneer Horace Mann wrote, “Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”1 This progressive vision persists in political rhetoric, even as politicians across the political spectrum starkly differ on the means of achieving equal opportunity for all students.2 Yet, not all degrees, not all colleges, and not all educations are equal. Such a truism would be morally insignificant if this inequality did not reflect an unjust distribution of the most basic goods of higher education: vocation formation and contemplation. If, as Paul Ricoeur argues, a care for institutions is vital to the ethical life,3 then we must also work to teach and learn in more just institutions of higher education. In this chapter, engaging with Paul Ricoeur’s corpus, I will aim to reconstruct a moral understanding of institutions that provides a crucial supplement to his reflections on just institutions. My model is built around four features that serve as hermeneutical keys to schematizing Ricoeur’s career long engagement with institutions: institutions as (1) structures of living-together that are (2) mediatory to distant others, (3) necessary to the formation of the self and to structuring meaningful action, and (4) ambiguous. My basic claim is that a Ricoeurean institutional ethic can offer a distinct contribution to the ethics of higher education by providing a framework that elevates the stake each person has in the institutions of which we form a part. This is accomplished by clarifying the role institutions play for the self, underlining their fraught nature, and articulating a vision of justice while remaining open to the insights of those who reflect deeply on the nature of higher education. 183

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This chapter is divided into three parts. In section 1, I unpack an ethical concept of the institution as drawn from across Ricoeur’s career around the four characteristics listed above. In section 2, I explore the institution of higher education, first drawing on the work of Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule in their work Action versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters,4 to parse out a teleology of higher education, arguing that vocation formation and contemplation are two internal goods of higher education. I then address the specific case of the California Masterplan. Finally, in section 3, I apply Ricoeur’s institutional ethic to higher education and parse out his theory of just institutions in his work with recourse to his adoption of John Rawls and his pluralization of the domains of justice. Throughout, I will work from theory to application, evidencing the merits of a Ricoeurean institutional ethic by its ability to help plumb the depths of the moral dimensions of the just institutions of higher education. 1. A RICOEUREAN INSTITUTIONAL ETHICS What is a Ricoeurean institutional ethic and how might it bear upon institutions of higher education? Institutions are placed centrally in Ricoeur’s moral thought. In his seminal work Oneself as Another,5 Ricoeur offers his most comprehensive architecture of his moral system.6 Therein, he presents a triptych of concerns that anchor the ethical aim of a self: to pursue the good life, with and for others, in just institutions. Each segment of the ethical aim is first treated from the lens of “ethics” (here meaning teleology) to understand the good, then pass through the sieve of the moral (here meaning deontology and analogous formal procedural reasoning) to understand justice, finally leading to phronesis (practical and, sometimes, tragic judgment) that both adjudicates conflicts and renders principles actionable. This triptych of spheres of concern are given the designations in another essay “a care for the self,” “a care for the other,” and a “care for institutions.”7 It is upon this “care for institutions” that I focus in this essay. Why select institutions from this triptych to approach an ethics of higher education? While an ethic of education from the vantage of the instructor might seem to be primarily concerned with an alterity ethic (a care for the other) or—in an age of teacher burnout—with a care for the self, Ricoeur’s work makes clear that any robust ethical project of the self is incomplete without also attending to institutions. For, as I discuss below, it is through institutional apparatuses that we relate to the distant other, it is within institutional contexts that we become human, and it is in the context of institutional ambiguity that we encounter distinct challenges to the moral life. Educational institutions represent the ethical dimension of institutions exceptionally so for

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they are among the prime sites of the development of our humanity. Students spend a significant period of their lives—over 7,000 hours—in school from childhood to early adulthood.8 While the amount of time in the classroom diminishes by the time one is in institutions of higher education, the ethical dimensions of institutions are even sharper as student-participants become more fully independent moral agents. Ricoeur’s teleological analysis in Oneself as Another provides the first feature of his understanding of institutions: institutions as structures of living together. With this he underlines institutions’ historical and peopled dimensions and points to the central good sought within them. “By institution, Ricoeur writes, we understand here the structure of living-together [vivreensemble] of a historic community—people, nation, region, etc.—a structure irreducible to interpersonal relation and meanwhile reliant on these in a remarkable sense that the notion of distribution will permit us later to clarify.”9 This compact, but nonetheless incomplete definition offers an important orientating hermeneutical key at the outset of this section. Seemingly descriptive, but set within his ethical framework, Ricoeur treats institutions according to the aim that they fulfill: institutions are vehicles by which we pursue a fundamental human good, that of living-together. While other thinkers might treat the term “living-together” merely as a sociological description,10 Ricoeur’s treatment of the term evidences a normatively laden understanding of living-together and institutions. A first hint that more is going on than neutral description is that Ricoeur’s definition is located within his ethical (or teleological) analysis. A teleology leads one to ask not simply about the “function” of institutions but also about the basic goals/goods around which institutions are oriented. Given the central role of living-together in this definition, we must understand institutions in Ricoeur’s work not merely as social assemblages of people but also as structures in and through which a basic good is desired, willed, and pursued: that fundamental desire to live-together. This applies to all institutions, including institutions of higher education. Institutions are not amoral; instead, the category of living-together opens to a normative feature intrinsic to institutions, the good pursued through them. My interpretation of a thicker account of Ricoeur’s use of the term “livingtogether” to describe institutions is further warranted by Ricoeur’s introduction of two forms of power exercised in institutions: a vertical relation of domination (read here Max Weber11) and (adopted from Hannah Arendt) a “horizontal relation constituted by the vouloir-vivre-ensemble of a historic community.”12 Vouloir can be translated here both as desire, pointing to the teleological basis of institutions and to the collective force that undergirds “power-in-common” reflected in our ability to act in concert. This power-incommon is drawn from Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy to describe and

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legitimate the most basic structures of society, particularly the state, but it is pervasive in every institution. Even in the classroom, whether at a university or under a baobab tree, this institution is an expression of this basic will-tolive-together, for it is action in concert that undergirds all collaborative learning. Thus, institutions (structures of living-together) are key engines through which we pursue the good of living-together and where our fundamental will-to-live-together is expressed.13 This power to act in concert and the very desire/will to live-together that fuels such power is often obscured and forgotten in our ordinary institutional life, only to be revealed when under threat. Institutions are often reduced down to domination, defined apart from us (reified as a they/them) or cast as inhibitors to authentic living-with others. When this power-in-common is suppressed or under threat, as in times of war or pandemic, the foundations of institutions and their role in our associational life are revealed. COVID-19 revealed that institutions are not structured to run on their own, but require the cooperation of the many, all acting in concert toward the broad goal of living together. In a time of social distancing, we likewise became far more aware, in our successes and failures, of the institutions that made possible livingtogether with distant others: classes were brought online while accessibility to democratic participation plummeted. Institutions need not become a they, but potentially remain how an us is constituted through power-in-common and collective action. A general teleological account of institutions anchored in the good of living-together must, however, wrestle with the question of how to relate this fundamental good to the distinct goods pursued by institutions that distinguish them. Moral theory is replete with models, ranging from Catholic Social Teaching’s general telos of the common good to more locally articulated goods, as found in Michael Walzer. Given Ricoeur’s work as a whole, a more conservative (thinner) model that nonetheless preserves living-together as a fundamental good is likely most consistent with his thought. The good of living-together need not conceptually do the work of directing all subsequent goods. Yet, like the common good, this basic good accentuates an institution’s social nature and points toward a wider network of institutions and communities of which each institution forms a part (each of which in varying ways connect to the good of living-together). Such a social good then would inherently qualify each good pursued in institutions, inviting us to consider the social dimensions, even in areas that seem obscured by ideologies of individualism—whether it be the narrow pursuit of profit in business or the myopic pursuit of personal achievement in schools. The good of living-together is vital, but insufficient in defining institutions. When Ricoeur describes institutions as the organized living-together of a historic community, he lifts out the inescapably “peopled” aspect of institutions,

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which highlights the second core feature of a Ricoeurean concept of institutions: they mediate our relationships to distant others. What is practically meant by this mediation? It is through institutions that I am tied to a host of others, whether it be a coworker, a new student at my university, a recipient of aid at a charity where I donate, another patron at a library, a fellow citizen, and so on. While our moral relations of those known face-to-face can often seem the most pressing in our life—for as Emmanuel Levinas maintains, their very presence can demand our ethical attention—institutions connect us to many we may not meet, but whose lives overlap with our own. Rather than allowing a lack of immediacy to dissipate our moral relationship to the other, Ricoeur’s institutional ethic demonstrates why institutions mediate to the distant, perhaps faceless, claims upon us. While Ricoeur’s early institutional ethic draws on Christian categories, describing our relation to the distant other as falling under neighbor-love,14 he later relies on the terminology of justice to identify the moral relationship to the distant other and the stake we each hold in institutions. In Oneself as Another and other writings from this period,15 he employs exclusively secular sources and names the distant other the chacun or each, harkening to the each of the suum cuique (to each their due). He thus links mediation to justice as the first virtue of institutions.16 This attribution underlines that we each have a moral stake in institutions because they are the sole mediator to these relationships that we find ourselves caught up in by virtue of our participation in institutional life. Our relation to the distant other is amplified further by Ricoeur’s work on responsibility where he argues that we have a distinct obligation to those rendered fragile/vulnerable by institutions.17 Not only does the university link me to distant students in other classes, but also it also links me to adjunct professors, facility workers, administrators, staff, alumni, and so on. We all are an “each,” just as the others across institutions are related to us as an “each.” We are not simply descriptively linked to others but also bound up by relations of justice. An unjust distribution of the goods of education, whether based on race, religion, socioeconomic background, or even mere institutional differentiation is a relationship we are each caught up in and—should we do nothing—that we each are complicit in. Institutions are not merely vehicles for other-regard, however, but also bear fundamentally on the self. The third marker defining institutions that I draw from across Ricoeur’s career is that they are necessary to the formation of the self, thus rendering analysis all the more pressing. Ricoeur’s position on the necessary role of institutions for the self evolves significantly over his career, from a strict Hegelian necessity, by which institutions make freedom possible, to a hermeneutic approach, by which institution help render actions legible. He subsequently also adopts an Arendtian approach, whereby institutions are sites for the recognition of human capability. The trope of the

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“necessity” of institutions first arises in his work as he engages in a Hegelian analysis of freedom and institutions; here, Ricoeur argues dialectically that the apparent conflict between freedom and institutions is resolved by (normatively) defining institutions precisely as that site where norms and rules of action enable each person to actualize their freedom without harming another.18 Subsequent to engaging with the work of Max Weber and Clifford Geertz, Ricoeur appears to rethink the warrant for the necessity of institutions (eschewing a full adoption of Hegel), incorporating hermeneutical analysis and identifying institutions as part of symbolic substrate that makes possible meaningful freedom, sedimenting values and rendering actions legible.19 Yet, Ricoeur’s rejection of Hegel is not total, underlining on my reading our fraught lives in institutions, for they are both vital, but also potentially insidious. Ricoeur adopts Hegel’s concept of Sittlichkeit or ethical culture, whereby actions sediment over time into normative values embodied in institutions and culture broadly that both form individuals and render actions normatively legible. He questions however, the hypostatic status of “objective spirit,” whereby institutions map onto an arc of moral perfection achieved in culture. He thus removes any clear moral anchor to the ethical sedimentations of culture. As such, institutions continue to serve as the ethical background of society, sometimes in insidious ways. Long before we are reflexive regarding our relation to the institutions around us, by necessity, we interpret the world and creatively act within a world of borrowed values and meanings. Our life in institutions is fraught when the rightness of these sedimented values are presumed. The history of institutions of American higher education is replete with examples of the insidious sedimentation of values that were taken for granted: segregation logics of separate-but-equal that once shaped our institutions nationally, boot-straps meritocracy that obscures the realities of privilege, and ever-recurrent vocationalism that narrows the aims of education. We find ourselves formed by institutions not of our own making, whose ways value rightness are falsely warranted by longevity. In Ricoeur’s final articulation of the necessity of institutions, he merges an anthropology of human capabilities, Hannah Arendt’s public space of appearance, and his concern for recognition. This articulation does the most work for our institutional ethic of higher education. In contrast to an atomistic vision whereby a self comes fully formed into community, Ricoeur’s understanding of the ongoing development of the self interfaces with a perspective that we need others and that we need the public sphere and institutions to develop as selves.20 While Ricoeur’s developmental account of the capable self has deep roots in his career, it finds its most comprehensive presentation in Oneself as Another, where four basic, nested capacities are identified as fundamental to the self: to act, to speak, to narrate, and to impute responsibility.21 This is not an exhaustive list, even of basic capacities, as later essays include a host of

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other capacities such as promising and submitting oneself to a symbolic order (including the moral norms of a community or institution).22 We do not develop our capacities on our own, nor even primarily in the private sphere, but do so publicly, in a range of institutions. Not only do certain capacities, such as submitting oneself to a symbolic order, presuppose a social or even institutional context, but these institutions are also the very sites where activity takes place, is nourished, and is seen. Ricoeur thus adopts and adapts Arendt’s concept of the public space of appearance to describe that social sphere, secured by the state, which allows us to exercise these capacities publicly. Yet, the term “public space of appearance” might give the impression of a single, monolithic domain in which activity is seen, limiting the scale and scope of institutions addressed and its use for higher education. Drawing on Jean-Marc Ferry’s concept of “orders of recognition,”23 Ricoeur pluralizes these public spheres and (on my reading) the modes and forms of recognition, allowing us to better consider the discrete role that institutions play in the development of the self as it is recognized and even as it demands to be recognized by others. Our lives are not lived in a monolithic public sphere, but across a host of different institutions from places of work, to the political sphere, to the sports arena, to houses of worship, to universities, and so on. While this last articulation of the necessary role of institutions to the self is far looser than the strict necessity found in the Hegelian dialectic of freedom and institutions, it is far more potent in linking institutions to the capable self, for the very development and becoming of the self takes place within a variety of institutions. This version of necessity can account for the contingency of the discrete history of individuals and their development while nonetheless preserving the sense of necessity first introduced with Hegel. Even though Ricoeur names very specific fundamental capacities that are critical to the self, the openness reflected in his work to the host of capacities which represent the full flourishing of a person also preserves his applicability to multiple domains. Indeed, we cannot simply understand institutions as a piece of a symbolic network or a sedimentation of values. Institutions are nurseries of a certain type of humanity. It is difficult to imagine the university apart from the skills that it seeks to foster, from basic skills like writing, reading, and critical thinking to overarching capabilities like contemplation and vocation formation. As I shall explore in the subsequent section, it is precisely this core role of institutions in nourishing and recognizing the capable self that renders any capricious asymmetrical distribution of the basic goods of higher education—contemplation and vocation formation—whether by institution or by major all the more troubling. For neglecting these goods inhibits the cultivation of the capable self. Recognizing the central role institutions play in the cultivation of the self helps to clarify and augment one’s personal and moral stake in these

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institutions and contributes to an institutional ethic of higher education. The necessity of institutions for the formation of the self amplifies both our self-regarding and other-regarding concern for institutions, transforming a self-interested institutional concern into an obligation to work for more just institutions for all. According to a vision of the self where one enters fully formed into our institutional life, obligations are conditional, based solely on consent. In contrast, Ricoeur maintains a picture of the self that develops in and through community. He writes, “these obligations are irrevocable, for the simple reason that the mediation of the community one belongs to permits human potentialities to develop fully.”24 The community and the institutions which structure the community’s life together makes possible the development of core capacities of the person, and, thus, our obligation to the community is bound up with our very development. It is the necessary role that institutions play in the development of the capable self that renders a stark asymmetrical distribution of the basic goods of higher education inequitable and immoral. A fourth and final feature of an ethical concept of institutions that I draw from Ricoeur’s work is their inescapable ambiguity.25 While institutions are not amoral, they are fully capable of being immoral. Indeed, certain thinkers hold they fundamentally render us immoral.26 As the three features I list above indicate, Ricoeur’s account is far more optimistic. Nonetheless, throughout his career, he shows a concern for the ways in which institutions, particularly political institutions, bear tendencies that subvert their best ideals. Inescapable institutional ambiguity is best evidenced in the various iterations of Ricoeur’s “political paradox.” Under this category, Ricoeur engages at three different points in his career with the distinct challenges of the political institution that cannot simply be thought or organized away, creating a practical paradox.27 According to the first iteration of the political paradox, despite efforts to address conflict within and to carry out directives of the state through politics, the state is reliant, even founded upon violence.28 This captures the problem of moving from the ideal to the concrete, which invites caprice and force. The second iteration of the political paradox illustrates that despite the underlying legitimation of the political order in a power-incommon, this can be obscured and forgotten, supplanted by a power-over of domination.29 The third iteration names that despite the political institution being the epitome of the institution and necessary for securing the space that makes possible the sustainability of all others, it remains, nonetheless, one institution among many.30 If we generalize this beyond simply the political, this last paradox introduces the problem of the plurality of institutions, amplified as one acknowledges that different institutional domains not only confer different values but also have different logics of justification. I will return to this third paradox (for it bears on the question of justice) in section 3. As

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captured in these three paradoxes, ambiguity is distinct from the actual harms that are produced by institutions. Instead, they serve as a caution against unrestrained optimism and suggest the necessity of vigilance for all who participate in them. While for Ricoeur the political institution remains the apogee of the ambiguity of institutions, particularly because of its “monopoly on violence,” I hold his paradoxes to be more capacious: ambiguity lives in each institution.31 All institutions invite caprice as they move from their mission and ideals to concrete application. Every institution is subject to displays of power that can undermine not only their goals but also the conditions of power-in-common that warrant our institutional life. While institutions bear their own value systems and logics of distribution, when seen as nested within more unified institutional domains, they remain permeable to other institutional domains, and, at times, subject to corrupting external influences that transplant logics and values foreign to them. Higher education is filled with instances of these. The adjunctification of the academy was not written into the ideals of the university but has resulted from this move into the concrete as institutions have reduced the resources directed toward educating its students and made up budget shortfalls through hiring contingent faculty. Despite ideals like academic freedom, as institutions have fallen under greater sway of donor influence, professors (and students) whose scholarship or public action unsettles those who hold the purse strings have found themselves facing disciplinary action. Similarly, the plurality of institutions and the systems of value and recognition that underpin them has also had its effect on the university; increasingly, universities are guided by corporate principles and administrative styles. Ricoeur’s articulation of three political paradoxes does not limit our discussion of institutional ambiguity to businesses. The multiple iterations of this paradox over time illustrate that Ricoeur’s writing on institutions is not a closed system, but responds to what he learned as he engaged with wider literature. Therefore, we need to draw out first the key insight that all institutions are inescapably ambiguous and work to describe the distinct ambiguities that plague particular institutions as social theory presents new frames for describing those ambiguities and especially as the attention to specific institutions reveal distinct institutional paradoxes. Drawing from across Ricoeur’s long career, I have identified four characteristics of institutions that serve as the backbone to a Ricoeurean institutional ethics: Institutions as structures of living together, that mediate to distant others, that are necessary to our well-being and flourishing, and that are inescapably ambiguous. Yet, this institutional ethic remains incomplete, for in following closely Ricoeur’s own insights, it remains overly general. An institutional ethic of higher education needs to ask what are the goods

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of the university, are the relationships mediated, what kind of self is formed and nurtured in and through these institutions, and what distinct ambiguities present themselves. Before turning then to the question of just institutions of higher education, an institutional ethic must matriculate. 2. ACTION VERSUS CONTEMPLATION AND THE CALIFORNIA MASTER PLAN Today, the university is a ripe terrain for ethical consideration from an institutional perspective.32 Perusing industry journals and the popular news, one is confronted with a host of moral problems in higher education. Symptoms include (1) The adjunctification of the academy with colleges and universities increasingly relying on a contingent labor force to teach their introductory courses. (2) The rising costs of college associated with ever increasing tuition expenses and a sense of moral obligation to send one’s own child to college, leading to the student debt crisis. (3) The admissions scandal of 2019 featured wealthy parents, administrators, education consultants, and coaches who fraudulently arranged for admission into elite universities through doctored standardized exams and sham athletic credentials. (4) The continuing struggle to render campuses more inclusive and diverse and to increase access and support for underrepresented minorities of all sorts. While each these issues are worthy of attention, particularly from the institutional ethical lens I sketched above—for they represent both personal and institutional failures—they nonetheless represent aberrations of the ideal of the university, despite their now prevalent occurrence. More problematic than falling short of an effort to create a context for flourishing, however, is understanding how this context—even in an ideal form—perpetuates a flawed system. This flaw is revealed by analyzing the California Master Plan of Higher Education through the ancient framework of praxis (action) and theoria (contemplation), which Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule in Action versus Contemplation recast in their chapters on higher education as vocation formation and contemplation. This lens discloses a sharp asymmetrical distribution of these two basic internal goods of higher education, a binary built into the very design of California’s system of higher education and prevalent across the academy. As such, the California

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Master Plan provides a useful case for the Ricoeurean institutional ethic that I reconstruct in this chapter. For Summit and Vermeule, the ongoing debate between action and contemplation is as long as Western thought and continues to pervade our lives. As English scholars, Summit and Vermeule are less prone to adopt philosophically fixed definitions of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, and instead they draw out enduring tropes associated with these themes. In different epochs, this constellation of themes contingently sediment with certain domains such as STEM versus the humanities. The authors write, The Sciences have absorbed the figures traditionally associated with the vita activa: practical application toward the public good; an emphasis on productivity, utility, and outcome; and an approach to learning that has come to be called “instrumental” by both its supporters and detractors. The humanities, on the other hand are routinely identified with the traditional values of the vita contemplativa: an emphasis on imagination, speculation, and reflection, and an alignment with higher values beyond the “merely practical, political, and economic.”33

In both umbrella categories, action is essentially tied to utility, while contemplation connects to loftier human pursuits, sought for their own sake. Yet, as the book as a whole substantiates well, our modern allocation of these values to the camps of STEM and the humanities is contingent. Indeed, historically, the roles have been reversed with the humanities precisely being studied for their contribution to society through disciplines like law and rhetoric and the natural sciences, a domain of philosophy, was correlated with the pure sciences, a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.34 It is my contention that action (recast as vocation formation) and contemplation represent two internal goods to higher education that can help us take the same first step of teleological analysis toward teaching in just institutions. Action as vocation formation codifies a host of activities that are oriented around preparing students for future careers. Contemplation in higher education is tied with a host of activities that are pursued for its own sake. Further, consider external goods as products which might result from an institution: degrees, publications, secure employment, and so on. By contrast, internal goods of an institution result solely from the participation in its practices. While the good of vocation formation can lead to employment, it remains an internal good because it is born in the activity of learning of higher education itself. With mounting student debt, it is undeniable that vocational formation in higher education today appears to have taken on a special urgency. This has led to a cottage industry of efforts to promote the vocational potential

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of humanity degrees, highlighting transferable skills like rhetoric and critical thinking. Indeed, reading popular literature on higher education, it might appear at times that the sole goal of higher education is vocational formation. Summit and Vermeule help contextualize this American “action bias.” The authors trace the recent history of a strong, sometimes exclusive, focus on vocational formation to “the social efficacy movement” from the turn of the twentieth century. This movement was championed by educational reformers like David Snedden who argues for a differentiation of training across different schools: “vocational education may be designed to make a person an efficient producer; liberal education may be designed to make him an effective consumer or user.”35 The social efficacy model works hand in hand with industry to produce more efficient workers for the various modes of production of society. As the authors indicate, one significant danger of the vocational approach is a form of educational tracking operating on a massive scale as certain careers become limited according to the institutions that one attends, mapping onto and perpetuating class distinctions and curtailing possibilities of individual students. As might already be apparent, the authors do not simply divide up action and contemplation according to disciplines, but instead present a more integrated vision of the two for the self, and I would suggest, for the institution of higher education as a whole. Despite being humanists, Summit and Vermeule do not advocate for a new emphasis on contemplation. Rather, they argue across their work that the binary itself is misleading and dangerous. They therefore suggest that each is “vibrantly alive in each of us, potentially fused rather than sundered. . . . Deep human needs call forth both possibilities. These poles can turn in harmony or they can rage apart.”36 Rather than suddenly privilege contemplation over action, Vermeule and Summit suggest both are essential to the human person and both in need of cultivation. In light of this commitment to contemplation and action, the authors name philosopher and educational theorist John Dewey as their champion for higher education. As a contemporary adversary of the social efficacy movement (epitomized in Snedden), Dewey argues for the synthesis of the humanities and the sciences and decries a sharp division that undermines both. Instead of simply privileging vocational formation or the aristocratic cultural formation bestowed by higher education, he holds both as essential features of higher education. As such, an education could be developed that would be “‘useful and liberal at the same time’—that is, productive of skill as well as knowledge, of practical use as well as human value.”37 There is a deep connection in his thought between knowing and doing. Further, on Dewey’s account, combining them tends toward a more democratic society in which people in all vocations can enjoy the benefits of contributing labor

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and of leisure. Ultimately, for Dewey (and for the authors), dividing liberal education from vocational education undermines both education and social flourishing. The California Master Plan of Higher Education presents an ideal case to consider why distributing the goods of vocation formation and contemplation becomes challenging because it reflects on a massive scale an intentional effort to restructure the institutions of higher education in California in an integrated manner, linking all public institutions of higher education under one overarching plan. Crafted in the late 1950s, it led to a significant effort to increase access to education for Californians under a unified educational vision. The architects of the plan identify that they were facing a future breaking of a “‘tidal wave’ of students,”38 resulting from the baby boom as well as the threat of intervention from the state government. In negotiation with the key stake holders representing community colleges, state colleges, and the research universities, a tripartite structure was formed that delineated the roles and tracks of each institution and stemmed off competition between them. Junior colleges were elevated from extensions of secondary education to part of a system of higher education providing terminal degrees and the possibility of transfer. The state college system, already expanding across the state, began to jointly offer doctorates with the University of California system, while still providing the training necessary to pursue jobs in agriculture and industry. The University of California system continued to offer access to the best educational resources higher education could provide. Stitching together these different institutions, the master plan broadened access, while nonetheless distinguishing among institutions, enabling each to pursue their own excellence.39 In the half century since the plan was put in place, there have been consistent efforts to evaluate its enduring strengths and prevailing shortcomings.40 While the California Master Plan dramatically extended access to education, according to the 2018 report “The Master Plan for Higher Education in California and State Workforce Needs,” in the 1960s, it was structured on the assumption of a largely homogenous, well-prepared population.41 Today’s population in California is incredibly diverse and presents the challenge of varying degrees of preparation. Rising costs of tuition and cost of living render many institutions inaccessible today. Likewise, sharp asymmetries exist in the markers of success between these institutions. Graduation rates within six years are staggeringly different across institutions: UC schools boast a six-year completion rate of 83 percent and Cal State schools trail at 54 percent. Only 29 percent of community college students complete an associate’s degree in three years.42 The California Master Plan has fallen far short of the ideal it proclaimed. These drastic variations in graduation rates demonstrate clear asymmetries built into California’s tripartite system. The preparedness of their students

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offers an incomplete explanation as to the unjust distribution of degree conferral. In order to connect this with flaws in the ideals of the California Master Plan, I will focus on one specific misdistribution, that of two “internal goods” of higher education: vocational formation and contemplation. Vocational formation is the subject of significant concern across the fields of higher education, including its importance in the California Master Plan. As higher education becomes more expensive, students and parents place greater demands on educators to illustrate the utility value of a degree by answering the question of how it might lead to employment. This has an institutional context as well. One challenge facing California is a mismatch between regional economies and regional institutions of higher education.43 For example, Silicon Valley has dramatically changed the workforce needs of the Bay Area, but regional educational institutions have been slow to respond to those changes with educational formation that can help meet these needs.44 Even when aligned with local economies, institutions of higher education face challenges in keeping up with the changing demands of the workforce.45 If vocational formation remains a central goal of education, in California and across the nation, institutions of higher education are falling short in providing this internal good of education. While the California Master Plan eschews the extreme alignment of education with the needs of industry found in the social efficacy model, it nonetheless reflects a capricious asymmetrical distribution of action and contemplation in the division of labor between its three institutional levels. This tripartite framework with a differentiation of functions served to meet those vocational needs while preserving the task of higher education to produce basic research, valuable for its own sake. Thus, junior colleges were primarily for vocational formation of occupations and transfers, state colleges for professional formation, and the universities oriented toward contemplation in their focus on pure research and formation in the aristocratic professions (law, medicine, etc.). As Summit and Vermeule report, “Research universities were to generate ‘an aristocracy of talent’ that was in need in ‘a society increasingly based on upon high knowledge and high skills’ while the less selective comprehensive universities served ‘the labor market requirements of a modern industrial society.’”46 The marriage of contemplation and vocation formation appear possible, but remain reserved to aristocratic professional training in elite institutions. More tragically, contemplation is effectively excised from the majority of higher education under the plan. The institutional division in California reflects broader currents, for the division of action and contemplation by educational institutions maps onto a broader claim that distinct disciplines and degrees are geared solely toward one good of higher education or another. While the humanities, in an effort to show their utility, have adopted (not unfairly) the language of transferable

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skills that is at home in vocation formation, I am unaware of a reciprocal movement to expand contemplation into vocation driven disciplines like nursing, criminal justice, or computer science. Yet each of these disciplines stand to benefit from higher-order reflection on ethics, philosophical and theological anthropology, and humanistic pursuits like literature that can leaven vocational pursuits. Even if emphases will invariably differ, the excising of one good or the other is done to the detriment to the student in higher education. 3A. TEACHING AND LEARNING IN GOOD INSTITUTIONS An asymmetrical distribution of the goods of higher education is undeniable. Is it, however, an ethical problem? Yes. Attention to the four characteristics of institutions that I identified in section 1 can help clarify the moral institutional dimensions of the California Masterplan in light of Summit and Vermeule’s analysis of action and contemplation. After grappling with the moral dimensions of higher education, we can turn to the framework of just institutions to help point to directions to resolve these asymmetries. Above, I drew on Ricoeur’s teleological definition of institutions as structures of living-together to argue that they are central means by which we pursue the good of living-together. While Ricoeur focuses primarily in his writings on institutions where this is most fundamentally apparent (family, the state), I argued that this is a constitutive feature of all institutions. Now, attending to higher education, we can see how this feature of institutions helps underline and emphasize the social, public, and moral component of all institutions and thus undermines individualistic, narrow meritocratic approaches to higher education. One can easily, for example, approach institutions like higher education from a primarily institutional and even contractual approach. After all, education is a central means of individual achievement and perfection as persons work to improve their skills, win honors and degrees, and add lines to resumes and secure employment. These are vital parts of education and motivators for many to pursue it. Even Summit and Vermeule’s categories of action/vocation formation and contemplation can be framed in solipsistic terms. When we frame institutions as necessary evils to accomplishing individual pursuits, then institutional obstacles to one’s apparent individual pursuit of excellence based solely on merit would appear to violate basic contractual terms. Such a logic prevails in students and parents who do whatever it takes to put their student ahead. A descriptive, nonnormative account of institutions of higher education as structures of living-together is insufficient to respond to this challenge.

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Recasting higher education, however, in light of this basic good of “living together” stresses the social dimension and the social good embodied in institutions of higher education. The individualistic account does point to a partial truth about institutions, namely that they play a core role for individuals in developing a capable self. To isolate and elevate this sole facet without attending to the constitutively social aspect of institutions as means of expressing this good of living-together fails to accurately describe institutions, especially in their moral dimension. One cannot approach institutions solely according to a logic of solipsistic self-regard. Extrinsic goods born from higher education, such as a well-formed citizenry or a community with sufficient doctors are subsidiary to this more basic, constitutive good of living-together. Even the internal goods of contemplation and vocation formation, which can easily be construed solely in individualistic terms, is keyed to the social. As such, this first characteristic provides an essential moral framing for approaching institutions of higher education, public or private. Despite the specialized goods that distinct institutions pursue, they are attuned to our social life together. The second core feature of institutions—that they mediate our relations to distant others—recasts the network of relations knit together through the tripartite California Master Plan as moral relations, specifying the social dimension highlighted in the first characteristic. The distant other, even if only encountered through abstractions like “fellow citizen,” is an actual other. In many moral systems and in the popular imagination, distance serves to diminish relations and moral responsibility. My mediatory account, via Ricoeur, avoids equating distant relations with near relations or flattening all relations of distance by raising from obscurity the actual relations born from the institutions in which we are entangled. It enables one to attend especially to those who are rendered most vulnerable within and by institutions. A student’s moral relationship to the adjunct at the university is not incidental to one’s attendance at a university, but caught up in it. The California Masterplan extends our relations even further, including each of the distinct institutions within the plan. It is precisely the call of such moral relations that lead individuals like Jennifer Summit to leave a tenured faculty position at Stanford University, to pursue a career in administration at San Francisco State where she can make a difference on a broader scale in the lives of lessprivileged students.47 The third feature of institutions—that they are necessary to the formation of the capable self—finds specificity in the work of Summit and Vermeule. While Ricoeur builds his vision of the capable self around four basic capacities (to act, to speak, to narrate, and to impute responsibility), his writings also point a more expansive set of skills48 which lead me to presume an openness to the capacities uncovered in institutions across cultures. Summit and

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Vermeule help clarify the capacities and subsidiary skills nourished within institutions of higher education in their work on vocation formation and contemplation. In the university, these serve as umbrella categories for a host of skills, such as vocationally directed skills (public speaking, actuary skills, and project management) and skills associated with contemplation (critical thinking). So basic are these to education that I name them internal goods of institutions of higher education. Ricoeur’s teleology of institutions remains overly general; by attending to specific institutions, such as higher education, we can better understand how they contribute to forming the capable self. More critically, however, unearthing this necessary role of institutions helps warrant a moral assessment of the asymmetric distribution of these internal goods of higher education, even as it does not yet provide clear guidance for a just distribution. Summit and Vermeule’s claims that action and contemplation are both fundamental parts of a person echoes Ricoeur’s articulation of the capable self. That institutions of higher education play a key role in the nourishing and recognition of the capacities of action as vocation formation and contemplation unites both self-regard and other-regard in our moral concern for institutions. Yet, clarity on what accounts for a just distribution remains still out of reach. Some may simply argue that any asymmetry of distribution of goods is unjust. This fails to recognize the very ordinary asymmetries of distribution around us, such as the distribution of medals and honors in sports to those who win or the distribution of medicine according to need. A nursing degree will inherently focus more on vocation formation than a philosophy degree. Indeed, a strict equality of distribution could lead to other injustices. Still, any stark asymmetry unfairly curtails the development of the capable self. The final feature, the inescapable ambiguity of institutions serves as a reminder that despite their best ideals and great achievements, institutions of higher education are always vulnerable to injustice. As captured in Ricoeur’s first political paradox, this ambiguity points to fault lines that cannot simply be organized out of institutions, rendering them always fallible to moral harm. The first articulation of the political paradox, which points to the caprice that can enter into an institution as it moves from ideals to action and from form to force is endemic in higher education. The California Master Plan is a fitting example of this. It was grounded on ideals of expanding access to education across California and elevating academic excellence on individual and organizational levels. In practice, however, it split the distribution of the basic internal goods of higher education. This is further amplified by concomitant asymmetrical material distributions: students at elite public schools have access to smaller class sizes (conducive to the type of activities associated with contemplation, like seminar discussions) and greater access to teachers through low student-professor ratios. Undergirding this feature of

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institutions is that this moral vulnerability in institutions is unavoidable, even as vigilance can help ensure it does not manifest as injustices. Likewise, higher education is prey to the vulnerabilities articulated in the second political paradox, expressed as the disjuncture of domination from above and the power-in-common that makes possible the collective action that warrants institutional life. We see this on the micro scale in the many forms of domination found in the classroom and in office hours between the teacher and students. Education is a collaborative process among a community of learners, and yet so often it is framed as a pure transmission of knowledge from the teacher to the student. On the macro scale, this is present in the political structures of the university as administrators exert domination over broad levels of student activity, often explicitly rejecting recognition of collective forms of powers by rejecting recognition of student unions. While hierarchies and legitimate forms of domination in higher education will always exist—for it is founded ultimately on a teacher-student relation—this paradox serves as a reminder of the possibility of abuse and the subversion of the collective and communal task of teaching and learning. These four characteristics of institutions in their distinct ways help us to unpack the moral dimensions of institutions of higher education. As institutions, they embody this pursuit of the fundamental good of living-together, helping to frame individual pursuits of excellence in their social dimension. Universities and colleges also mediate our moral relationships to a host of persons, both near and far, requiring attention to the institutional other, especially those most vulnerable. Institutions of higher education play critical roles in forming students toward becoming more capable selves, especially under the rubrics of action and contemplation, uniting the moral concerns of both self- and other-regard. Finally, the ambiguous nature of institutions reminds us that no institution, including our great institutions of higher education, can be free of moral vulnerability. Each of these characteristics help uncover the already implicit moral aspects of institutions, rendering them intrinsically open to moral analysis. 3B. TOWARD JUST INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION While reframing our approach to institutions, the four characteristics identified above do not outline what a just institution or a just university might be. For this, we must turn to Ricoeur’s treatment of justice and consider how his reflections might apply to the university. The first insight that can be drawn from Ricoeur is that before arriving at the point of discerning principles regarding the equitable distribution of goods, one must first understand the

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goods of an institution. In Ricoeur, the ethical (teleology) takes priority over the moral (deontology). This chapter has modeled this emphasis on the ethical, drawing on Summit and Vermeule to uncover the basic internal goods of higher education. Ricoeur’s treatment of institutions helps us to see these goods as imbricated in the cultivation of the capable self, allowing us to better perceive the moral imperative to justly distribute these internal goods of higher education. For Ricoeur, the ethical must pass through the sieve of the moral as analysis of goods gives way to an analysis of procedures and principles of justice. To address the principles (and process) governing just institutions, both Clark Kerr (the key architect of the California Master Plan and former UC Berkeley president) and Ricoeur draw on the theorist of justice and political liberalism John Rawls. From a Ricoeurean perspective, however, Kerr takes away the wrong message from Rawls by falling prey to a new form of aristocratic consequentialism. Kerr engages in a retrospective justification of the asymmetries of the California Master Plan by employing an aristocratic reading of Rawls’s difference principle.49 In Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, the difference principle is the means of justifying social and economic inequalities, ensuring that (1) they are to the benefit of the least advantaged and (2) that they are tied to positions open to all. This principle follows lexically the first principle of justice in which all are guaranteed equal rights before the law.50 In Kerr’s aristocratic application of Rawls, he collapses the two aspects of the difference principle and then applies them directly to higher education, maintaining that the asymmetrical distribution of education in the Masterplan is just so long as elite education is accessible by merit and in so far as society as a whole benefits from the training toward elite professions, producing doctors, lawyers, business leaders, and so on. As the aphorism goes, a rising tide raises all boats. Kerr’s collapse of these two aspects of the principle, however, leads to a macro-level consequentialism that fails to attend to the impact on the person, especially the most vulnerable. This thus models the harms of utilitarianism that Rawls explicitly is writing against and allows for exactly the type of stark division that I outline above. The two internal goods of education, both contemplation and vocation formation, should be nourished in all students. Kerr’s problematic use of Rawls does not, of course, devalue Rawls’s thought for reflecting on more just institutions of higher education. Ricoeur draws on Rawls in ways that remain faithful to essential elements of Rawls’s theory of justice while maintaining coherence with Ricoeur’s reflection on institutions. He incorporates into his institutional ethic key elements from A Theory of Justice such as justice as the first virtue of institutions, the device of the original position, and the two principles of justice described above. This coherence is evidenced in part with Ricoeur’s basic understanding of

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institutions. While for Ricoeur, institutions at their base are the means by which we live-together, principles of justice help ensure that basic rights of those within in the community are not trumped in some utilitarian pursuit of the maximization of the happiness of the majority. Ricoeur thus endorses Rawls’s basic assertion that justice is the first virtue of social institutions. Living-together already presupposes a nascent understanding of justice. In critical ways, Ricoeur’s adaptation of Rawls enhances Rawls’s applicability generally by enabling the incorporation of teleological analysis of institutions against the backdrop of an anthropology of the capable self. While Ricoeur incorporates the original position, it is now set in this context. For Rawls, institutions are central means of distributing roles and goods and the principles of justice set the parameters for that distribution. The thought experiment of the original position imagines placing persons behind a veil of ignorance, where they would be unaware of their personal role/identity, who in deliberating would arrive at these very principles of justice. This serves as a central warrant for Rawls’s theory. Behind the veil of ignorance, Rawls assumes a basic understanding of society. Starting from the “ethical” in Ricoeur’s work, we must also build into this thought experiment a knowledge of what we have already worked through above. As I argue above, institutions play core roles in the development, flourishing, and recognition of capable selves—one might even ask if recognition should be listed among those goods distributed by institutions. The alignment of self-regarding interest and other-regarding interest arising out of this central role that institutions play in the forming of the self echoes the intention of the original position, whereby apparent self-interest amidst ignorance of one’s position behind the veil leads to the affirmation of principles of justice. Rather than using Rawls to support the aristocratic outcomes of Kerr’s Masterplan, read with Ricoeur’s anthropology, Rawls’s difference principle points to a better alternative to the California Master Plan, reforming the distribution of the goods of higher education such that each student, across institutions of higher education, have basic access to vocation formation and contemplation (and the accompanying conditions that support them). The two aspects of the difference principle—(1) that asymmetries benefit the least and (2) that positions are free and open to all—must be understood as related but distinct. Justifiable asymmetries are not exhausted by macro-level considerations like an increase in the professions, access to education, or an increase in graduations. In Rawls, the difference principle functions precisely to ensure that utility does not trump the minority. Read with Ricoeur, instead of simply attending to measurable outcomes, applying the difference principle includes attending to how policies and practices in institutions nourish the development of the capable self, especially among the least advantaged.

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Ricoeur’s adaptation also improves Rawls’s applicability to specific institutional domains that do not immediately fall under Rawls’s definition of basic structures of society like higher education, pointing to the possibility of reforming the California Master Plan. By defining institutions as structures of living together and applying the measure of justice to all institutions, Ricoeur’s work pushes us to apply the question of just institutions beyond the basic structure of family or government to consider institutions like higher education that bear directly on the formation of the capable self. Localized to the specific organized living-together of institutions of higher education, one would ask if something so basic as the constellation of skills caught up in vocation formation and contemplation should be starkly divided according to the institution one attends or whether they should be present in each institution, indeed even each discipline, even as they may be tailored to the needs and aspirations of student and adapted within the parameters of a mode of study. In contrast to the original California Master Plan, where vocation formation almost exclusively defines lower tier institutions like community colleges and even vast segments of instruction in the Cal State system, applying the institutional ethic I’ve sketched above privileges the just distribution of both the internal goods of higher education (vocation formation and contemplation), working to ensure they are integrated in all three branches of Californian public higher education. Realizing that the most vulnerable constituents of higher education—underrepresented minorities, such as first-generation college students, racial minorities, and lower-income students—are most likely to rely upon community colleges and least likely to complete those same degrees, the difference principle would indeed require asymmetrical attention and resources be provided to those institutions that serve the least privileged, not a justification of aristocratic formation. But localized accounts of justice would appear to run counter to Rawls’s singular understanding of justice. I contend that Ricoeur’s adaptation allows for this more localized consideration of Rawls’s deontological procedures by setting him in dialogue with one of Rawls’s earliest critics, Michael Walzer. This results in the articulation of a third political paradox which both recognizes a plurality of institutional domains with their own logics of justice and justification and privileges the encompassing nature of the political. Even as Rawls’s theory of justice is unitive, providing a system and principles that can function for each of the basic domains of society (such as polity and family) and encompass other domains from there, in his institutional ethic, Ricoeur places Rawls’s procedural formalism after a teleological analysis. Thus, when reading Rawls’s Theory of Justice alongside Walzer’s Sphere of Justice, which advocates for different hermeneutics of justice according to different domains, the integrity of these domains is taken seriously.

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The diversity of institutional models of justice requires a new articulation of the political paradox to hold them together and underlines the central role of phronesis or practical wisdom to resolve ensuing conflict. Ricoeur’s third political paradox precisely enumerates that while the political does play a privileged role vis-à-vis other institutions, making possible their existence, it nonetheless remains an institution among others. Ricoeur’s later appreciative engagement with Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s Economies of Grandeur which, along the lines of Walzer, identify distinct modes of recognition and justification in distinct domains, seems to suggest a more fractured account of justice in Ricoeur’s work.51 Rather than a single set of principles serving as the sieve for the teleological, perhaps the deontological sieve requires thinking justice within each sphere. Then, practical wisdom is given the final and most important place: when distinct formulations of justice come in conflict, such as the conflict of market logics with the reasoning of higher education, to adjudicate one must turn to practical wisdom—funded by the very principles that give rise to our social life together.52 Such principles would include, I presume, a recognition that a basic vouloir vivre-ensemble— a will/desire to live-together—grounds our institutions. To those who might doubt that such a process could ever take place in higher education, the California Master Plan itself models just such a collaborative engagement within higher education even as it falls short of a just distribution of the goods of higher education. My argument above indicates that reflections on the principles undergirding a just arrangement of higher education need precisely to take place within the sphere of higher education, while remaining open to prudential wisdom at sites of conflict. In this respect, the original process of developing the California Master Plan is admirable: desiring to avoid a solution imposed by the state, representatives of respective institutions drew together to craft a plan that resulted in the dramatic expansion of access to higher education. By balancing institutional interests, however, without recognizing the capabilities fostered within them, a stark asymmetrical distribution of the internal goods of education became an unjust distribution. Yet, it need not be so. A renewal of higher education is as important as ever, but it must be just. While the original California Master Plan should be lauded for the dramatic expansion of access to education that it made possible, it nonetheless subverts basic ideals of higher education through stark asymmetrical distribution of the internal goods of education. Rather than simply starting again from above, a Ricoeurean renewal of higher education should attend to local initiatives—already experiments in the just distribution of external goods of higher education like retention and completion and the internal goods of vocation formation and contemplation—while relying on macro-level tools like the masterplan to ensure a just education for all. Already across

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the country, professors, departments, and even whole universities are drawing on practical wisdom as they pilot initiatives that seek to creatively yield vocation formation and contemplation. Humanities programs are seeking to attune their students to the transferable skills of their studies through summer internships and computer science students are being formed in ethical reasoning through engaging with science fiction literature. Just as educators and administrators first organized the California Masterplan, they can renew it by starting from the goods of higher education, reflecting on their just distribution according to the principles of justice, and rely on practical wisdom to adjudicate to conflict. Rather than justifying the aristocratic outcomes of Kerr’s Masterplan, a Ricoeurean institutional ethic of higher education helps educators, administrators, and policy-makers to draw on the insights of a teleology of higher education to parse out the many goods of education (both internal and external) and procedural formalism to ensure that these goods are justly distributed to each, not solely for macro-scale outcomes but also toward the flourishing of the capable self. The California Master Plan already evidences the possibility of collective action toward improving the lot of all in higher education. It could be, however, renewed to be more just. The just university need not be an unreachable ideal—it is born of out of the hard work and reflection incipient in living-together. CONCLUSION In a world where the marketplace remains a prime metaphor, action versus contemplation might appear simply to be a matter of choice, elective options in higher education according to one’s capacity and interest. If, as Summit and Vermeule argue, however, action and contemplation are not sharp binaries, but integral to each person, then we will need institutions of higher education capable of incorporating both into the formation of students. In this chapter, I developed a Ricoeurean institutional ethic that could draw on the insights of Summit and Vermeule and analyze this institutional division as reflected in California Master Plan. As such, I could render the asymmetrical distribution of goods as a moral problem, given the role institutions play in the nourishing, cultivation, and development of the capable self. Indeed, universities are not marketplaces, but exemplify those institutions through which we pursue the good of living together. Further, as I demonstrated, such an ethic horizontally extends the obligation to work toward a more just distribution of these internal goods of higher education, for we are morally caught up in the mediating relationship of these institutions. Yet, as I suggest, all institutions—including colleges and universities that laud the great ideals of humanity—are run through with ambiguity, requiring constant vigilance.

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A Ricoeurean institutional ethic can help illuminate and advance a more just vision of institutions of higher education. Institutions are not ahistorical edifices, but peopled structures. We who teach in, learn in, and manage within institutions of higher education bear responsibility for them. As educational access continues to expand in this country, students should not be served in false-fronted institutions. It is imperative that we be vigilant so that institutions ensure an equitable distribution of those most important goods of education: vocational formation and contemplation. Together, we can work toward more just institutions of higher education for all. NOTES 1. Massachusetts Department of Education, Twelfth Annual Report of the Board of Education Together with the Twelfth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board (Boston: Dutton & Wentworth, State Printers, 1848), 59. 2. This vision of education can be seen in two recent U.S. Secretaries of Education. Obama’s secretary Arne Duncan quotes Mann explicitly. See Arne Duncan, “Leading a Life of Consequence | U.S. Department of Education,” December 10, 2011, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ed.​​gov​/n​​ews​/s​​peech​​es​/le​​ading​​-life​​-​cons​​equen​​ce. Betsy Devos warrants her arguments for school choice on the grounds that it would help achieve equal educational opportunity, especially for those who are not financially well off. See Betsy Devos, “Competition, Creativity & Choice in the Classroom,” Federation for Children, March 11, 2015, http:​/​/www​​.fede​​ratio​​nforc​​ hildr​​en​.or​​g​/wp-​​conte​​nt​/up​​loads​​/2015​​/03​/B​​etsy-​​SXSWe​​du​-sp​​eech-​​final​​​-rema​​rks​.p​​df​ ?e4​​0fe9.​ 3. Paul Ricoeur, “L’éthique, la Morale et la Règle,” Autres Temps: Les Cahiers du Christianisme Social 24, no. 1 (1989): 52–59. 4. Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule, Action versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 5. Ricoeur, “L’éthique.” 6. Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xii. 7. Ricoeur, “L’éthique,” 53. 8. Phillip Jackson notes that by the time students enter junior high, a child will have logged over 7,000 hours in the classroom. Ranked by time spent, attending school is only overtaken in sheer hours by sleep. Within these 7,000 hours, educational institutions are the sites of formation of their young students, both formally in the classroom and informally on the playground and the lunch room. See Philip Wesley Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004), 5. 9. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 227. Ricoeur’s privileging of common mores is exemplified in his focus on a teleological analysis before the procedural (which is closer to rules and regulations).

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10. The sociologist Robert Bellah and collaborating authors in The Good Society describe institutions as patterned ways of living-together thus underscoring descriptively the social nature of institutions. Robert N. Bellah et al., The Good Society, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1991), 4. Ricoeur could even be read as presenting a descriptive account. He names institutions as structures of living-together and, elsewhere, as “un vivre-ensemble organisé” or “an organized living-together.” See Ricoeur, “L’éthique,” 55. In so doing, he often privileges in his attention and analysis the state, which epitomizes institutional life. Indeed, descriptively, a city, state, or even a family capture a comprehensive view of people living-together. 11. Popularly understood simply pejoratively, domination is drawn in Ricoeur’s work from the more neutral account given by Weber, who uses this to describe the proclivity of those to follow orders of one superior to them. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (New York: Bedminster, 1968). 12. Paul Ricoeur, “Responsabilité et Fragilité,” Autres Temps: Les Cahiers du Christianisme Social 76, no. 1 (2003): 134. 13. There are significant implications to Ricoeur’s normative account of institutions. By favoring a fundamental good orienting institutions, Ricoeur eschews a classic understanding of institutions within political theory where the state and other basic social forms are a necessary evil. Instead of a Hobbesian compromise in which order is sought to preserve against the violence of the war of all against all, in Ricoeur’s social ethic what brings people to form the institutions at the foundation of society is already a desire to live-together. Likewise, Ricoeur’s model serves as an antidote to amoral models of institutions, found both among political realists who deny morals outside of the sphere of contracts and among social scientific accounts of institutions where the measure of institutional health is according to posited aims and not the fundamental goods undergirding distinct institutions. While amoral analysis is valuable (just as pure description helped clarify the sphere of institutions above), when method and mimetic representation replaces the actual social body being studied, one can quickly assume all institutions are likewise amoral, rendering ethical analysis as a second step, a normative flavoring for those with the taste for it. 14. Ricoeur’s interest in the challenge to traditional moral theory posed by relations mediated by institutions dates to his early essay “Le Socius et le Prochain.” In this essay, he contrasts a scriptural account of neighbor-love, often framed by proximity, with contemporary institutional realities, where persons are often only known “statistically” or in the abstract. Nonetheless, he proposes it is with the same neighbor-love that one approaches the prochaine (meaning both neighbor and near one) and the distant other. The institution, then, becomes the vehicle to confronting a moral other not addressed in our face-to-face encounters, but nonetheless named as “neighbor” rendering institutions fundamental sites of moral analysis. See Paul Ricoeur, “Le Socius et Le Prochain,” in Histoire et Vérité, 2nd ed. Collection Esprit (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 113–128. 15. Paul Ricoeur, “Le Bonheur hors Lieu,” in Où est le Bonheur?, ed. Roger-Pol Droit (Paris: Le Monde Éditions, 1994), 327–337.

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16. While he adopts this phrase from Rawls, we can see here that the very terminology he uses to describe the other linked to institutions is framed by the language of justice. 17. Ricoeur, “Responsabilité et Fragilité.” 18. Paul Ricoeur, “Le Philosophie et le Politique devant la Question de la Liberté,” in La Liberté et l’Ordre Social: Textes des Conférences et des Entretiens Organisés par les Rencontres Internationales de Genève, by Kéba M’Baye et al. (BoudryNeuchâtel: Les Éditions de la Baconnière, 1969), 41–56. 19. Ricoeur’s most comprehensive treatment of meaningful freedom/action is found in Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 20. See Paul Ricoeur, “The Fragility of Political Language,” trans. David Pellauer, Philosophy Today 31, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 37. 21. At the end of his career, Ricoeur names a focus on the capable self a perduring theme throughout all his writings. See Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response,” in John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall, ed., Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought (New York: Routledge, 2002), 279–290. One can trace a picture of the self as a “task” from even his first publication, a personalist account of the human. See Paul Ricoeur, “Notes sur la Personne,” La Semeur 7 (May 1936): 437–444. 22. Paul Ricoeur, “Le Destinataire de la Religion: L’homme Capable,” in Écrits et Conference 3: Anthropologie Philosophique, ed. Johann Michel and Jérôme Porée (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2013), 415–451. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, “Capabilities and Rights,” in Severine Deneulin, Mathias Nebel, and Nicholas Sagovsky, eds., Transforming Unjust Structures: The Capability Approach (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 17–26; Paul Ricoeur, “Asserting Personal Capacities and Pleading for Mutual Recognition,” in A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur, ed. Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 22–26. 23. Jean-Marc Ferry, Les Puissances de l’Expérience: Essai sur l’Identité Contemporaine (Paris: Cerf, 1991). For Ferry, “orders of recognition” are specific domains or complexes where distinct forms of recognition are bestowed according to their own logics: the socioeconomic complex, the sociopolitical complex, and the sociocultural complex. While Ricoeur does not take up Ferry’s specific domains, his adoption opens up a space for considering each institutional domain as a possible site of recognition. 24. “Ces obligations sont irrévocables, pour la simple raison que la médiation de la communauté d’appartenance permet aux potentialités humaines de s’épanouir.” Paul Ricoeur, “Langage Politique et Rhétorique,” in Lectures 1: Autour du Politique (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1991), 163. 25. I develop this category in order to generalize the insights found in three iterations found in the political paradoxes named across his career: Paul Ricoeur, “Le Paradoxe Politique,” in Histoire et Vérité, 2nd ed. Collection Esprit (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 294–321; Ricoeur, Oneself as Another; Paul Ricoeur, “La Place du Politique dans une Conception Pluraliste des Principes de Justice,” in Pluralisme et Équité: La Justice Sociale dans les Démocraties, ed. Joëlle Affichard, Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld, and Maryse Aoudaï (Paris: Éditions Esprit, 1995), 71–84.

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26. See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 27. Developed along his career as he entered into dialogue with great thinkers, Ricoeur later provides a summative engagement with the different iterations of the political paradox in Critique and Conviction. See Paul Ricoeur, François Azouvi, and Marc B. de Launay, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 95–101. 28. Ricoeur, “Le Paradoxe Politique.” 29. This is described in Ricoeur, Oneself as Another. 30. Among other places, see Ricoeur, “La Place.” 31. In fact, Ricoeur’s own reflections on the political are partly shaped by his experience as dean at Nanterre. See Ricoeur, Azouvi, and de Launay, Critique and Conviction, 39. 32. James Keenan’s University Ethics does a great job of considering a full range of applied issues, identifying commodification at the heart of a cluster of ethical problems that stray away from the mission of the university to educate citizenry toward the common good. See James F. Keenan, University Ethics: How Colleges Can Build and Benefit from a Culture of Ethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). 33. Summit and Vermeule, Action versus Contemplation, 64. 34. Interestingly Peter Harrison identifies (among other factors) the refiguring within European Christianity of charity as tied to social benefit and an articulation of science as geared toward the public good as central elements that helped secure the perdurance of a cultural interest in science by a broader British culture. See Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2017). 35. Summit and Vermeule, Action versus Contemplation, 86. 36. Summit and Vermeule, Action versus Contemplation, 19. 37. Summit and Vermeule, Action versus Contemplation, 84. 38. Clark Kerr, “Chapter 3: The California Master Plan of 1960 for Higher Education—An Ex Ante View by Clark Kerr,” in The OECD, the Master Plan and the California Dream: A Berkeley Conversation, ed. Sheldon Rothblatt (Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education University of California, Berkeley, 1992), 49, https​:/​/oa​​c​.cdl​​ib​.or​​g​/vie​​w​?doc​​Id​=hb​​8489p​​1ft​;N​​AAN​=1​​3030&​​doc​.v​​iew​=f​​rames​​ &chun​​k​.id=​​div00​​004​&t​​oc​.de​​pth​=1​​​&toc.​​id​=di​​v0000​​4​&bra​​nd​=oa​​c4. 39. See Master Plan Survey Team, “Master Plan for Higher Education in California, 1960–1975” (Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education, 1960). 40. The most recent such reports identifies eight distinct reviews, noting that there is no consensus as to what constitutes among these an “official review.” “The Master Plan for Higher Education in California and State Workforce Needs” (Sacramento, CA: Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, 2018), 9–13. 41. “The Master Plan,” 16. 42. PPIC Higher Education Center, “Improving College Completion” (Sacramento, CA: Public Policy Institute of California, April 2016), https​:/​/ww​​w​.ppi​​c​.org​​/cont​​ent​/p​​ ubs​/r​​eport​​/R​_04​​​16JJ2​​R​.pdf​.

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43. “The Master Plan,” 48. 44. This is captured well by one regional university president who stated, “the regional economy changes exponentially, but my university can only change incrementally.” “The Master Plan,” 48. The rate of economic change, meanwhile, outpaces the ability of colleges and universities to adapt. A former president of a Bay Area state university summarized the challenge facing public institutions of higher education when he observed, “the regional economy changes exponentially, but my university can only change incrementally.” “The Master Plan,” 203. 45. As future employment demands greater technological capacity, it remains difficult for slow moving institutions of high education to adapt. As the 2018 report states, “The process of creating and revising courses and programs lags behind changing economic demands.” “The Master Plan,” 48. 46. Summit and Vermeule, Action versus Contemplation, 198. 47. Summit and Vermeule, Action versus Contemplation, 7. 48. See Ricoeur, “Le Destinataire.” 49. Kerr’s reflection is retrospective, because Rawls had not yet written A Theory of Justice when the plan was crafted. Kerr instead notes that in the moment, his philosophical orientation was influenced by Thomas Jefferson, who both extolled the importance of widespread democratic education, while maintaining the need for an “‘aristocracy of talent’ to provide the skills of leadership and the technical skills of doctors and lawyers and so forth in the society.” See Kerr, “Chapter 3,” 55–56. Kerr’s employment of Rawls evidences traces of this Jeffersonian influence, leading on my account to an aristocratic reading of the difference principle that privileges the creation of aristocratic professions from which all of society, including the poor would benefit. 50. These are laid out in John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999). While Rawls describes the principles first, he maintains that these would be the principles selected within “the original position,” a form of thought experiment that replicates the conditions of a hypothetical social contract. 51. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer, Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lecture Series (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 204. 52. This is already suggested in Ricoeur’s treatment of prudence in light of tragic wisdom within Oneself as Another.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Affichard, Joëlle, Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld, and Maryse Aoudaï, eds. Pluralisme et Équité: La Justice Sociale dans les Démocraties. Paris: Éditions Esprit, 1995. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Anne Swidler, and Steven Tipton. The Good Society, 1st ed. New York: Knopf,  1991.

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Deneulin, Severine, Mathias Nebel, and Nicholas Sagovsky, eds. Transforming Unjust Structures: The Capability Approach. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. Devos, Betsy. “Competition, Creativity & Choice in the Classroom.” Federation For Children. March 11, 2015. http:​/​/www​​.fede​​ratio​​nforc​​hildr​​en​.or​​g​/wp-​​conte​​nt​/up​​ loads​​/2015​​/03​/B​​etsy-​​SXSWe​​du​-sp​​eech-​​final​​​-rema​​rks​.p​​df​?e4​​0fe9. Duncan, Arne. “Leading a Life of Consequence | U.S. Department of Education.” December 10, 2011. https​:/​/ww​​w​.ed.​​gov​/n​​ews​/s​​peech​​es​/le​​ading​​-life​​-c​ons​​equen​​ce. Ferry, Jean-Marc. Les Puissances de l’Expérience: Essai sur l’Identité Contemporaine. Paris: Cerf, 1991. Harrison, Peter. The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2017. Jackson, Philip Wesley. Life in Classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press, 2004. Keenan, James F. University Ethics: How Colleges Can Build and Benefit from a Culture of Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. Kerr, Clark. “Chapter 3: The California Master Plan of 1960 for Higher Education— An Ex Ante View by Clark Kerr.” In The OECD, the Master Plan and the California Dream: A Berkeley Conversation. Edited by Sheldon Rothblatt, 47–60. Berkeley, CA: Center for Studies in Higher Education University of California, Berkeley, 1992. https​:/​/oa​​c​.cdl​​ib​.or​​g​/vie​​w​?doc​​Id​=hb​​8489p​​1ft​;N​​AAN​=1​​3030&​​doc​ .v​​iew​=f​​rames​​&chun​​k​.id=​​div00​​004​&t​​oc​.de​​pth​=1​​​&toc.​​id​=di​​v0000​​4​&bra​​nd​=oa​​c4. Massachusetts Department of Education. Twelfth Annual Report of the Board of Education Together with the Twelfth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board. Boston: Dutton & Wentworth, State Printers, 1848. “The Master Plan for Higher Education in California and State Workforce Needs.” Sacramento, CA: Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, 2018. Master Plan Survey Team. Master Plan for Higher Education in California, 1960– 1975. Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education, 1960. PPIC Higher Education Center. Improving College Completion. Sacramento, CA: Public Policy Institute of California, April 2016. https​:/​/ww​​w​.ppi​​c​.org​​/cont​​ent​/p​​ ubs​/r​​eport​​/R​_04​​​16JJ2​​R​.pdf​. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999. Ricoeur, Paul. “Asserting Personal Capacities and Pleading for Mutual Recognition.” In A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur. Edited by Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema, 22–26. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. ———. “Le Bonheur hors Lieu.” In Où est le Bonheur? Edited by Roger-Pol Droit, 327–337. Paris: Le Monde Éditions, 1994. ———. “Capabilities and Rights.” In Transforming Unjust Structures: The Capability Approach. Edited by Severine Deneulin, Mathias Nebel, and Nicholas Sagovsky, 17–26. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. ———. The Course of Recognition. Translated by David Pellauer. Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lecture Series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. ———. “Le Destinataire de la Religion: L’homme Capable.” In Écrits et Conference 3: Anthropologie Philosophique, edited by Johann Michel and Jérôme Porée, 415–451. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2013.

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———. “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response.” In Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. Edited by John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall, 279–290. New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. “L’éthique, la Morale et la Règle.” Autres Temps: Les Cahiers du Christianisme Social 24, no. 1 (1989): 52–59. ———. “The Fragility of Political Language.” Translated by David Pellauer. Philosophy Today 31, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 35–44. — — — Histoire et Vérité, 2nd ed. Collection Esprit. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967. ———. The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. “Langage Politique et Rhétorique.” In Lectures 1: Autour du Politique, 161–175. Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1991. ———. “Notes sur la Personne.” La Semeur 7 (May 1936): 437–444. ———. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. “Le Philosophie et le Politique devant la Question de la Liberté.” In La Liberté et l’Ordre Social: Textes des Conférences et des Entretiens Organisés par les Rencontres Internationales de Genève, by Kéba M’Baye, Paul Ricœur, Raymond Aron, Ignacy Sachs, Herbert Marcuse, and Cardinal Daniélou, 41–56. Boudry-Neuchâtel: Les Éditions de la Baconnière, 1969. ———. “La Place du Politique dans une Conception Pluraliste des Principes de Justice.” In Pluralisme et Équité: La Justice Sociale dans les Démocraties. Edited by Joëlle Affichard, Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld, and Maryse Aoudaï, 71–84. Paris: Éditions Esprit, 1995. ———. “Responsabilité et Fragilité.” Autres Temps: Les Cahiers du Christianisme Social 76, no. 1 (2003): 127–141. ———. Time and Narrative, vol. 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Ricoeur, Paul, François Azouvi, and Marc B. de Launay. Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Summit, Jennifer, and Blakey Vermeule. Action versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Treanor, Brian, and Henry Isaac Venema, eds. A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Wall, John, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall, eds. Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. New York: Routledge, 2002. Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. New York: Bedminster, 1968.

Chapter 10

Should Religion-Affiliated Institutions Be Accredited? Ricoeur and the Problem of Religious Inclusivity Nathan Eric Dickman

Should religiously affiliated colleges be accredited? I pose this question to challenge current accreditation practices in U.S. higher education. My challenge has to do with ways some religious affiliations restrict critical inquiry. To this end, I examine Ricoeur’s approach to religious hospitality because I want to show the ways he helps us responsibly navigate religious diversity on campuses that strive for religious inclusivity, to help my audience see that we can preserve hope for critical inquiry even through accrediting agencies. I first lay out relevant elements of Ricoeur’s approach to religious discourse. Second, I clarify problems with religious diversity in higher education (ed) accreditation. I close by providing accreditation policy suggestion to help us preserve hope for the future of higher ed. 1. RICOEUR’S APPROACH TO RELIGIONS AS LANGUAGES I want to introduce Ricoeur’s unique approach through this consideration: What year is it? We know about alternative era-dating systems specific to other religious traditions besides the Christian era-dating system. Many Buddhists mark the year to Gautama Buddha’s birth. Jews mark the year to the moment of creation. Muslims mark the year in reference to the Prophet Muhammad’s founding of the ummah in Medina. Which one is “true”? My point is that people render their experience of time intelligible in light of their cultural contexts. Local principles of intelligibility are given definition by 213

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narratives and traditions within which people develop self-understandings.1 These different worldviews are like languages. As Ricoeur writes, “The verdict must be accepted: the forms of the religious share the same state of dispersion and confusion as languages and cultures, the state recognized in the Babel myth.”2 We must, for Ricoeur, give up our pretense to immediate access to a core spiritual experience in phenomenology and examine religious traditions through the arduous “detour” of interpretation in hermeneutics.3 Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology theorizes human beings as an integrated bundle of capabilities simultaneously threatened by disintegration under conditions of existence.4 Conditions of existence pressurize ontological polarities to the point of breaking us apart. Any integrity we might realize over our lifetime is a “fragile achievement.” To be someone who can speak, can act, and can take responsibility is “the fragile synthesis of [human being] as the becoming of an opposition.”5 As Ricoeur writes, “Radical fragmentation . . . radical but not original—is the very given of history.”6 Thus, desire for an alternative state of being arises, serving as a “regulative ideal” by which we strive for goodness or integration.7 In this striving, we seek the ultimate ground or “unconditioned.” Ricoeur asks, “this unsoundable bottom, is this not the very source of life that all receive, but that no one can encompass?”8 Our striving is oriented by the unconditioned, and this helps explain why religious diversity often results in envy, hatred, and violence. The unconditioned, as that which exceeds any limited perspective on it, is perceived by communities as a scarce resource, and—in what Girard calls “mimetic rivalry”—we compete over that resource.9 Thus, the origin of religiously framed violence throughout history lies in a more primordial “violence seizing the source of life itself.”10 Rather than a humility honest about human limits, this violent seizure consists of what Pamela Sue Anderson elaborates as an intrinsically masculine “desire to be all that there is.”11 Yet our “pretension to monopolize the source, to appropriate it in rivalry with other recipients,” does not exhaust “the source’s fundamental generosity.”12 Like a container overflowing, religious communities desperately—but futilely—try to reinforce their boundaries through intensified rigidness by which people can claim who is “in” and who is “out.” We can see why religious inclusivity and religious hospitality are so difficult: our pretense to seize totally the unconditioned for ourselves. Because the unconditioned resists complete conceptualization, we can only express our fundamental dispositions of desire for—and fundamental feelings of suffering alienation from—the unconditioned in symbols and myth.13 Symbols are not signs and myths are not direct descriptions of some set of facts.14 They do not ostensively refer to or represent reality. Rather, with Ricoeur, symbols are best analyzed through a semantic approach that locates them on the predicate side rather than the subject side of a complete

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thought.15 They are not like Post-It notes stuck on the forehead of some god. As predicates, they open up an eminently immanent refiguration of this world. Consider the opening question, “What year is it?” Our answer will consist of a complete thought: This year is 1440 AH. That is, we pick out a particular moment with the pronoun “this,” and render the moment intelligible with a predicate defined through the semantic field of the Islamic calendar. For Ricoeur, the purpose of religious symbols, despite our propensities toward rivalry, is to deliver “the core of goodness from the bonds that hold it captive.”16 This is done through redemption of the real in predicative refigurations. Symbols and myths are culturally specific and historically transmitted traditions.17 Despite the regulative ideal of the unconditioned’s seeming universality, radical incommensurability between cultures seems to trap us in relativism. As Ricoeur writes, “The fragmentation of textual collections and scriptural traditions makes it such that the continent of the religious stands out like a detached archipelago, where one cannot locate anywhere the universality of the religious phenomenon.”18 The unconditioned can only be expressed concretely in a particular moment. Due to symbols’ linguisticality, they are expressed differently from moment to moment, culture to culture. As the myth of Babel expresses, religious communities “share the same state of dispersion and confusion as languages.”19 We need to hesitate here. Our discussions of “the” unconditioned and the Babel myth seem to suggest some absolute point of view or super-religion, some lost paradise of a universal language, to which we need to get back. An idyllic era “before” Babel never existed since it is a myth, and thus there is no moment to which we could return. In rejecting this, Ricoeur asks, “have we not exchanged the idea of universal truth for that of radical relativism?”20 As Gadamer elaborates, “this mythical account turns things on their head when it conceives of [humankind] as originally unified in using an original language later sundered by a confusion of languages.”21 Rather than a symbol concretizing the regulative ideal in desire for the unconditioned, such anxiousness to accuse others of “relativism” transforms the symbol into an idol of fanatical literalism.22 To fanatical literalists, becoming conscious of the myth as myth is a loss of “reality,” rather than a gain in receiving its donative power. Militant atheists can be just as literalist. Both sides in debates about “creationism” assume creation myths are either accurate or inaccurate descriptions. Such anxiousness about linguistic and religious diversity assumes a “placeless place, a surveillance point,” from which the epistemological subject overlooks “the dispersed field of religious beliefs.”23 What these literalist takes neglect, however, is translation. Translation is, for Ricoeur, the “only known remedy for the dispersion and confusion of languages.”24 We have, as Ricoeur emphasizes, “always translated.”25 He asks,

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“Is it not with something similar to this linguistic hospitality that we achieve a gradual understanding of religious beliefs we call foreign, and in general, an understanding of convictions of all kinds, of which the exploration of religious beliefs constitutes but one chapter?”26 Through translation, we can proceed laterally and aoristically (step-by-step without a particular end by which to measure “progress”) in our inclusive endeavors. We cannot know ahead of time what will result. As Gadamer writes, The multiplicity of languages does not represent an insurmountable barrier . . . Every language is teachable. Thus a person is always capable of overcoming all boundaries [represented by language], when that person seeks to reach an understanding with the other person. Indeed, in the experience of a limit that resides in the word as such one really finds an infinite task.27

Translation and learning more languages stand in opposition to some “overhead perspective” that claims to “embrace the totality of the religious field.”28 To the Babel myth’s utterly fragmented relativism and in opposition to it, we need to suture together what Ricoeur calls a “moveable perspectivism,” whereby we can consider alternative perspectives upon learning their languages.29 As Moyaert clarifies this: “Translation is never just putting one set of ideas and concepts into the language of another; rather, it is the risky enterprise of letting strange ideas interact and change one another.”30 Because we can liberate ourselves from our immediate environments through predicative refiguration, we are free for exercising our capacity to “bring the world into language.”31 The diverse surplus of productive predication is, for Ricoeur, the “poetics of the good.”32 For this infinite task of translation and language learning in religious diversity, Ricoeur points out that one thing is demanded of us: “with regard to religions other than my own, I should practice the same imaginative and sympathetic adoption that I demand of my listeners when, in their presence, I proceed with [discussions of my Christian faith].”33 We need to use the same phenomenological suspension in our practice of learning new religious languages. This is possible through the phenomenon of questioning. Ricoeur identifies questions as a unique kind of speech act, calling them “interlocutionary” speech acts because they are presupposed in all discourse.34 It takes actually asking a question to be able to consider a complete thought as a potential response.35 Questioning, as Gadamer elaborates, “maintains a distance from [responses] while simultaneously being open to them as possible answers.”36 In this way, questioning is more fundamental than assertions, positive or negative, by holding multiple suggestive syntheses of sentential subjects and predicates simultaneously. Thus, questioning in such suspension

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of possibilities maintains an openness to both doubt and belief, to both rejection and commitment, without fanaticism. Questioning has an interlocutionary aspect. It generates a space in which to welcome others’ contributions. What is crucial here is that we make sure we are asking their questions in their terms. Consider, for example, Tillich’s point about ineffective evangelism: The difficulty with the highly developed religions of Asia, for example, is not so much that they reject the Christian answer as answer, as that their [conception of] human nature is formed in such a way that they do not ask the question to which the Gospel gives the answer. To them the Christian answer is no answer because they have not asked the question to which Christianity is supposed to answer.37

What Tillich points out is that “they” are not asking “our” questions. This might tempt evangelists to strategize ways to get non-Christians to ask Christian questions. For my purposes here, however, we are focused exclusively on how we make sure we are asking others’ questions. When we hear their question, and we ask it with them, the question is transformed into “our” question, and only then are we opened to consider their answers to it.38 This does not entail we agree with or appropriate their answers. It only positions us to consider others’ answers as possibilities for us. Through learning their subjects and predicates, and thus acquiring a vocabulary within which to ask their questions, it becomes very difficult to claim that all religions are “the same” just in culturally different symbols.39 Some “super-religion” cannot be the result, either.40 The fragile achievement we can hope for here is to stand where our convictions are anchored in their soil, like our mother tongues, yet are open to others’ convictions. Even if one were able to ask others’ questions and fuse horizons with them, this does not yield a more universal religion. Consider how the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh are at odds about how to live this out. The Dalai Lama criticizes attempts to integrate purportedly discrete religions into a new “syncretic” religion.41 Instead, he suggests that everyone honor their own religious inheritance. If incorporating practices from other religions facilitates a person’s fulfillment, such as using Buddhist meditation in support of one’s Christianity, then that is acceptable. Thich Nhat Hanh, alternatively, promotes having “more than one spiritual root.”42 He seems at times to develop and promote a combination of Buddhism and Christianity, into what we might coin as “Buddhianity.” He promotes and encourages support for interreligious marriages. Nevertheless, both demonstrate fluency in religions other than their own. Given this approach, what are some proposals we can make for accreditation policies?

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2. ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE ABOUT ACCREDITATION While I question whether this should be so, many religiously affiliated colleges are accredited by agencies like the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) as well as field specific accreditors such as the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) and the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM). NASM, for instance, claims to establish “national standards for undergraduate and graduate degrees and other credentials for music,” among other services supporting music-related educational endeavors.43 Music programs at educational institutions, whether religiously affiliated or not, must meet these national standards to be accredited. While there is also the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) for the accreditation of seminaries and divinity schools, I am focused on federally licensed accreditation through agencies like SACSCOC. Accreditation involves the ability to award federal financial aid to students, supporting colleges’ efforts to balance budgets. The average cost of college is beyond the immediate means of most students. Over 80 percent of students depend on financial aid.44 Accreditors are gatekeepers to a greater than $120 billion pool. Accreditors protect taxpayers from needing to compensate people defrauded by for-profit predators, like Corinthian Colleges, where loan-forgiveness costs could reach $3.5 billion.45 If a college, regardless of its mission, loses its accreditation by its institutional accreditor, then it loses eligibility to award financial aid. For most colleges—especially small private liberal arts ones—this mean closing their doors. Their survival incentivizes seeking accreditation.46 It may be helpful to appreciate anxieties that can emerge when wondering how to trust colleges and the infrastructure that supports this kind of trust. An underlying anxiety is how one can trust colleges. It is not just about whether college will help me get a job later in life, but whether a college is merely out to take my money. How can I protect myself from predators like Trump University, ITT Technical Institute, and Corinthian Colleges? Fortunately, numerous federal judges have found in favor of debt-discharge for students exploited by these businesses, despite Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s objections that such debt-discharge puts “taxpayers on the hook for significant costs.”47 Legal decisions like this are on the backend of suffering losses and seeking restitution. Accreditors work on the front end, hopefully as a preventative measure to reign in businesses often consumed by their bottom line or to expose prejudiced restrictions on free inquiry by administrations. On the part of prospective students, accreditation agencies purport to go beyond folk imaginaries of what constitutes a “good school.” We know from studies spanning primary school to higher education demographics that the phrase “good school” is often a euphemism for white-majority areas and

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institutions.48 Accrediting agencies claim to replace folk imaginaries with objective criteria. These agencies seek to assure the public of a college’s quality and integrity through a rigorous internal and external review process “during which the institution is evaluated against a common set of standards.”49 To achieve accreditation, a college needs to have an “appropriate” mission, sufficient resources and services to accomplish the mission, specific educational objectives, and a method for assessing how and demonstrating that those objectives are met. Difficulties for learning about accreditation compound because accreditation agencies are themselves subject to accreditation. Organizations such as the Council of Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) and the US Department of Education (USDE) maintain lists of accreditors recognized as “highly likely to be legitimate.”50 Importantly for us, “some religious schools choose not to be listed.”51 That is, because of tensions between religious affiliation and free inquiry, some religious colleges themselves recognize it may be against their interests to be evaluated by “a common set of standards” because they claim unique epistemic privilege—such as that claimed through religious revelations. CHEA’s advice for navigating this reflexive conundrum? “Because often no simple ‘litmus test’ is available to gauge whether an accreditor, school or program is legitimate, members of the public act prudently who consult resources such as those CHEA and government bodies cite, and who conduct further inquiries. In this area, not to “look before you leap” can be a costly, painful, and consequential mistake.”52 Concerned students and guardians should research articles cited by CHEA and USDE, which lead to more citations needed to be researched. Otherwise, one is not acting “prudently” and is under threat of making a painful “mistake.” The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is an advocacy organization for shared governance where faculty themselves contribute to institutional decision-making, for defining values and standards fundamental for higher ed, and for ensuring higher ed’s contribution to the common good.53 The AAUP establishes “best practices” that should define higher ed, particularly with respect to academic freedom and tenure. When the AAUP determines that a college does not live up to these best practices, they issue a “sanction” or “censure” of the current administrators and the labor conditions under which professors work. Yet where the AAUP sanctions a school, administrators simply ignore it. For example, the AAUP voted to sanction Vermont Law School (VLS) for changing “14 of 19 total tenured professors to contingent appointments without faculty involvement.”54 Yet VLS’s president responded that although he is “disappointed by the AAUP’s action,” it is “important to remember that the AAUP is an advocacy organization and is not involved in the accreditation of Vermont Law School.”55 In other words,

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though the AAUP does not recognize VLS as legitimate, VLS can simply turn to “higher” authorities. This tactic of appeal to “higher authorities” often goes double for religiously affiliated colleges. What authority is higher than a religion’s divine beings? Because some religious doctrines seem to conflict with higher ed values, some religiously affiliated colleges choose not to be on accredited lists. However, most affiliated colleges seek accreditation because it both grants access to federal aid and lends colleges additional credibility in the public eye.56 We can imagine, then, that a student can earn a Bachelor of Science degree in psych at a “Christ-centered” undergraduate college like Belmont University, earn a Masters’ degree in counseling from a “Christ-centered” program like that at Liberty University, and—given that these institutions are accredited—go on to be a credibly licensed therapist. This is not unique to Christianity. Naropa University, for instance, is “mindfulness-centered,” inspired by Vajrayana Buddhism’s influence on Western society, and is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC).57 The Maharishi University of Management, also accredited by the HLC, is a “ConsciousnessBased” education system rooted in the Transcendental Meditation movement.58 Moreover, as noted above, seminaries and divinity schools can appeal to the “higher authority” of the ATS. Does affiliation bolster or undermine the credibility of a college? Can both critical inquiry and religious freedom be promoted on an accrediting level? As I showed above, Ricoeur’s model rooted in shared questions and archives of religious symbols for answering those questions is a fitting way to preserve both. 3. RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION Many affiliated colleges attempt to be inclusive by accepting students, staff, and faculty of different religions or no religion. They abide by federal and state employment policies, issuing statements that they do not discriminate on the basis of religion. Despite an ideal of inclusivity, a problem persists in that such colleges perpetuate “pervasive structures of religious privilege.”59 Students, staff, and faculty who identify with the affiliated religion often lack awareness that religious others “perceive the campus climate as unwelcoming or even hostile.”60 This lack of awareness of privilege pervades the entire campus—from institutional policies to extracurricular student organizations. These dynamics exclude perceived “others.” For example, religious minorities have to “out” themselves to request accommodations.61 Some colleges hold “spiritual life” retreats for all campus members that solely involve Christian practices. Board meetings open and close with Christian prayers.

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Service awards and honors societies often require one to publicly identify as Christian. While none of these practices appear actively to persecute religious others, Christian hegemony is taken for granted without critical reflection about its inconsistency with inclusivity. Concerns emerge about how this prejudice inhibits critical inquiry. As Eboo Patel urges, religious prejudice should be classified among social injustices like racism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, and sexism.62 Colleges attempt to confront these injustices through initiatives like the creation of race and gender studies programs and student groups for mobilization of disenfranchised communities such as the Black Student Union or Hispanic Student Association. A crucial matter of equity in a religiously diverse society is freedom from unjust religious prejudice. This negative prejudice constricts students’ and faculty’s freedom of critical inquiry, often without even noticing it. Pew polls in United States show that citizens see atheists as among the least trust-worthy of all coreligionists.63 President Trump successfully campaigned with his base on the rhetoric urging a travel ban on Muslims. Positive prejudice can atrophy freedom of thought. Why, as examples, is yoga practiced in the recreation center and Buddhist-inspired meditation used in counseling programs, but salat (Islamic prayer) is not appropriated for its health benefits—despite studies showing salat’s benefits for one’s lower back and joint elasticity?64 U.S. citizens are “spiritual shoppers,” where we perceive religions under advanced capitalist consumerism.65 Elements of religions are commodified into purchasable goods, and religious institutions are themselves structured by supply and demand.66 Dreamcatchers and miniaturized Zen rock gardens can be bought in most supercenters and yoga classes are around every corner. When families move to a new area, they “shop” for a church or synagogue that “feels right” by visiting one after another. Neoliberalism make it seem as if the default position is religious neutrality from which we select or purchase our preferences. Religion is perceived as voluntary. Yet as I showed above, Ricoeur can help one recognize religious “choice” is no more in our voluntary power than what language is our “mother tongue.” Ricoeur’s approach helps us see the vacuity of commodified “religionage” (like baggage or garbage). General illiteracy further complicates this commodified framework.67 A Pew Research survey on U.S. citizens’ knowledge of religions conducted in 2010 suggested most self-identifying evangelical Christians are among the least knowledgeable about religion—even about their own.68 The general average seems disturbingly low, given the majority in the United States identify with some form of religion. The lack of literacy goes beyond Christian unfamiliarity with basics in Christianity, such as the Apostle’s creed. Popular surveys indicate an increasing number of Christians claim to believe in “reincarnation,” a purportedly Hindu belief.69 The point is that this overall lack of

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religious literacy structures pervasive religious prejudice in colleges because people embodying that prejudice do not even know “basic facts” about their own religion let alone others’ religions. If it is crucial, as I explained with Ricoeur, that understanding religious others involves the arduous labor of learning religious others’ symbolic languages, then—again—contemporary religious illiteracy embodies a naively contented religious exclusivism. What can colleges do? Though many students still identify with a specific religion, a rapidly growing number refer to themselves as “spiritual but not religious” or even identify as “none”—though more data reveals that the “nones” do subscribe to various kinds of meaning-making.70 Despite their showing a strong interest in and involvement with spirituality, as Rice points out, colleges “do little to foster student . . . questions of meaning and purpose.”71 Some accredited affiliated colleges seek to support just this sort of inquiry. The United Methodist handbook for affiliated colleges, for example, states, “Rather than either isolating faith as something outside the curriculum or mandating a particular set of beliefs, United Methodist-related colleges and universities provide courses and cocurricular programs that enable students to delve into questions of meaning and purpose.”72 I highlight this to underscore the UMC’s explicit recognition of a difference between seminary-modeled education and liberal arts modeled education. The primary focus is scholarship and education, not ministry. While colleges can tailor their affiliation in ways that best fit with their broader vision, the UMC provides some guidelines. UMC-affiliated colleges need to respect and provide “the teaching of religion” and to respect practices of campus members who “choose to participate in the [sic] Christian tradition.”73 UMC-affiliated colleges should “allow faculty and students to explore the place of religious belief and practice, and specifically the intellectual dimensions of Christian faith, in all academic disciplines and co-curricular activities.”74 These guidelines are about quality control for protecting and learning about Christian belief and practice. They do not provide guidelines for navigating religious inclusivity and activism. A college can resist religious diversity, be accredited and considered a viable UMC-affiliated institution. Yet the guidelines indicate some awareness of others who prefer not to explore religious commitments. That is, campus members can, but do not have to, explore religion in culture whether they are personally religious or not. Despite some openness to religious diversity, UMC-affiliation results in problems. For example, many UMC-affiliated colleges have equal opportunity employment policies that they do not discriminate on the basis of, in particular, sexual orientation and sexual identity. One UMC-affiliated college’s statement: Huntingdon College is committed to a policy against legally impermissible, arbitrary, or unreasonable discriminatory practices. Therefore, the College . . .

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prohibits discrimination in its employment practices and in the delivery of its educational programs on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, religion, age, and/or national origin.75

In early 2019, leaders of the UMC voted to enforce their long-standing ban on LGBTQIA+ clergy and marriage. Many UMC progressives hoped their Judicial Council would find this ban to be unconstitutional, but they approved the ban plan on April 26, 2019. On January 5, 2019, presidents of ninetythree UMC-affiliated colleges issued a joint statement affirming “access and inclusion of all students, faculty, and staff on our campuses regardless of their race, ethnicity, creed, national origin, gender, gender identity/expression, or sexual orientation.”76 These colleges face several dilemmas. Should they seek reaffiliation? Should they discontinue their affiliation? The primary concern not surprisingly is potential substantive decline in financial resources if they seek disaffiliation.77 Imagine an undergraduate degree in ministry certified by the UMC, such as that at Martin Methodist College. Will nonheteronormative students be rejected from the program since they will be banned from service by the UMC? The point is that religious inclusivity extends beyond just religious diversity but concerns inclusion of the entire person. This is not a problem only for Methodist colleges. Wheaton College, for example, tried to fire tenured professor Larycia Hawkins for stating that Muslims and Christians worship the same god.78 Hawkins’ donned a hijab for solidarity to confront numerous injustices faced by U.S. Muslims, such as Trump’s campaign calls for a Muslim travel ban. Because colleges like Wheaton or Westmont violate the American Philosophical Association’s (APA) nondiscrimination policy, philosophers requested that the APA remove their job ads in the employment opportunities page.79 These colleges discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender presentation, requiring job candidates to sign onto the statement that “Scripture condemns . . . homosexual behavior.”80 Disturbingly, a number of other self-identifying philosophers, the majority of whom work at places like Wheaton or otherwise publicly identify as “Christian,” responded by claiming that while there is general consensus that racism, sexism, ableism, and ageism are wrong, there supposedly is no similar consensus that discrimination against nonheteronormative practices and identities is wrong.81 The counter-letter’s argument is, of course, specious. Arguing against accrediting such colleges, Conn points out that accrediting discriminatory institutions undermines its ideal of conferring legitimacy.82 Conn writes, “By awarding accreditation to religious colleges, the process confers legitimacy on institutions that systematically undermine the most fundamental purposes of higher education.”83 Religious boundaries on one’s

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life and thought compromise research and learning. However, accreditation makes no such restrictions on colleges because accreditation merely recognizes that a college is making strides to meet its mission, regardless of whether that mission expresses explicit discrimination.84 Accreditation does not entail that a college is successfully promoting critical intellectual inquiry. We need to argue that it should, raising the question of what constitutes an “appropriate” mission that can balance critical inquiry with religious affiliation. Is a mission that expresses exclusive commitment to a single religious tradition an appropriate mission? Even at affiliated colleges whose missions explicitly promote liberal arts learning, pervasive religious privilege restricts what even counts as genuine questions of meaning and purpose. As an example, West claims that UMCaffiliated colleges’ missions should make “the Judeo-Christian [sic]” perspective relevant.85 (Such hyphenated attempts at inclusivity cover up millennia of antisemitism.) Unlike Ricoeur’s inclusive mode of shared questioning, West insists the following are the “big questions” of meaning and purpose: What am I called to do with the life God has given me? . . . Who is my neighbor? What does the command to love require me to do? What about the command to do justice? How often must I forgive someone who wrongs me? Can I love money and also love God? . . . Is it permissible to kill, even in order to defend myself? What does it mean to be faithful to my wife, my husband? What must I do to receive eternal life?86

These questions privilege Christian subjects and predicates, which stands in diametric opposition to the flourishing cacophony of predicates Ricoeur promotes. Indeed, West—like many at Christian affiliated colleges—formulates the primary purpose of such colleges as to “make disciples of Jesus Christ.” What makes such colleges stand out, according to West, is that students “will have the opportunity to explore intellectually what it means to have the mind of Christ and live with that mind.”87 Yet, as West mentions, “any liberal arts education worth its salt will give students the tools to understand the major world faiths.”88 Students should engage “major” religious traditions “in dialogue with the [sic] Christian faith.”89 As an aside, the definite article ahistorically smears across Christian differences. Does West include the Church of Latter-Day Saints in this monolithic “the”? If the primary questions are already framed in peculiar Christian terms, how can alternative religious traditions be engaged with sufficient respect? In West’s and many others’ framework, Christian-centered questions shape the conversation before the conversation even starts. Thus, we need to be suspicious about whether the questions are actually being asked or if, instead, they function as mere prompts for the recitation and regurgitation

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of official doctrine. Unlike West’s artificial restraints on questions (and, ipso facto, answers), Ricoeur’s model of translation, of learning others’ languages, opens up to inclusive inquiry while maintaining one’s mother tongue. Conn and West represent polar extremes: on the one hand, the total rejection of religion’s influence in appropriately credentialed higher ed; on the other hand, the total subordination of critical inquiry to the terms of a single version of a religion. My wager is that we can navigate between these extremes through Ricoeur’s theory of religions as languages and a focus on open-ended questioning. As we have seen, this issue of open-ended questioning is the crux of a Ricoeurian approach to religious inclusivity. 4. A HOPE FOR HIGHER EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS INCLUSIVITY One crucial goal of colleges worthy of the name is the facilitation and protection of the freedom to ask questions of meaning and purpose, the protection of the liberal arts. Many college leaders avoid use of the phrase “liberal arts” because they fear prospective student associations of it with progressive politics. This is a lost opportunity in public advocacy. As studies of underrepresented peoples in college leadership positions show, this is systemic since administrations predominantly perpetuate status quo white privileged patriarchy. Such catering to the public serves administrative interests against perceived “leftist” faculty.90 For those of us concerned about preserving radically open critical inquiry even at religion-affiliated liberal arts institutions, we need to anchor our policy proposals in line with advocacy for liberal arts learning.91 One place to start is through Aristotle’s identification of the telos or purpose of human being as realizing eudaimonia or flourishing, where virtues facilitate and vices inhibit maximal exercise of our definitive capabilities.92 One unique power that differentiates us from other organisms is that we are discursive.93 The maximal exercise of discourse is central for our flourishing. As Aristotle puts it, human eudaimonia is the exercise of our mind in the life of study.94 Of course, “studying” does not mean cramming for exams, but the shared practice of questioning for the sake of expanding our horizons. Through questioning and dialogue with others, we integrate ourselves—we enrich our experience by emphasizing some features rather than others, remember experience from different perspectives, and resolve conflicting interpretations of experience. We should see how Ricoeur’s approach fits within this liberal arts model. Inasmuch as the life of study is defined by engaging questions of meaning and purpose, learning questions and potential responses of other religions

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only enhances our maximal flourishing. This is nothing of which to be afraid. Millennia ago, Augustine responded to anti-liberal arts fears this way: As to those who are content to follow authority alone and who apply themselves constantly to right living and holy desires, as long as they take no account of the liberal and fine arts, or are incapable of being instructed by them—I know not how I could call them happy as long as they live among people.95

While there may be disagreement on how to address populist discouragement and even persecution, there is broad agreement among religious and nonreligious thinkers that human beings are maximally fulfilled through liberal arts learning. Our policy suggestions should help facilitate the life of study. I believe that the primary distinction—by which to assess religion-affiliated institutions striving to preserve liberal arts inquiry—needs to be between colleges that are merely apathetic from colleges that are deliberately inclusive. As an example of apathy, consider West’s elaboration of the “big” questions. Because they are loaded with Christian predicates, they constrain rather than facilitate maximal freedom. Moreover, as prompts for doctrinal recitation, it is unclear whether they are even genuine. It seems that only Christian questions and Christian answers count. This apathy mutes dialogue and does not examine the college’s “mono-religious heritage.”96 Administrators, staff, faculty, and students generally get by without questioning general structures of religious privilege. It goes unchallenged, shaping an environment that religious others experience as hostile. These others respond to this hostility by creating coalitions “rooted in the need to oppose religious hegemony on campus.”97 Even in Conn’s militant atheist criticism, there is an absence of considering affiliations beyond fundamentalist Christianity. Yet again, Ricoeur’s approach to interreligious translation and dialogue can be seen to help eliminate monolithic hegemonies better than simple atheist negations that reinforce the problem. Deliberately inclusive colleges, alternatively, recognize “the epistemic value of religious diversity” and explicitly promote questioning across differences.98 Thus, such colleges allow differences to raise questions about privilege and identity. They confront those systems through collective reenvisioning of campus missions, traditions, and symbols. The measure is whether or not religious others “function as partners with equal voice in shaping the campus climate, beyond merely combating oppression.”99 On the course level, faculty can represent varying religious holidays in syllabi. Student affairs staff can create allied training sessions for facilitating dialogue about religions where diverse voices are heard. Colleges can create religiously neutral spaces that can be reserved by different student organizations for practices such as salat or zazen, in addition to their chapels marked by Christian

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symbols. Recall that, with Ricoeur, religious inclusion is a way to prompt the whole person toward flourishing, inviting them to ask questions of life’s meaningfulness. On such deliberately inclusive campuses, these questions can be asked in ways that aren’t limited and constrained. Accreditors need to develop such a criterion to assess the quality of affiliated colleges. The issue is not whether a college strives to live out a more inclusive vision, such as Wagner College, or a college strives to reaffirm its religious heritage in the midst of affirming cultural pluralism, such as Elmhurst College.100 The crucial issue is whether a college is apathetic or deliberately inclusive. If a college is merely apathetic, it fails to show sufficient striving to reach our liberal arts ideal. If a college is deliberately inclusive, it demonstrates sufficient strides to reach our liberal arts ideal. What this principle clarifies is the difference between a college “grounded in” and a college “historically affiliated” with a religious tradition. A grounded institution restricts the big questions and inhibits discursive freedoms of campus members. An affiliated institution supports radical openness necessary for discursive freedom, where the college facilitates asking and answering questions wherever they lead campus members. Multilingualism abounds among administrators, staff, faculty, and students. For an inclusive college to satisfactorily respond to pervasive religious privilege, that privilege must be put in check. The key issue is how to assess affiliated colleges that are apathetic.101 Grounded institutions restrict critical inquiry, which is easy to spot in their mission statements. Affiliated institutions, ideally, self-check possible pervasive religious privilege. An apathetic college is an affiliated one that is not doing its job. That is, our common standard for accrediting affiliated colleges needs to show that a college is not making sufficient strides. A grounded college should acknowledge this upfront, and thus publicly celebrate its being denied access to federal financial aid. Affiliated colleges that, as a result of assessment, turn out to be apathetic should be allowed a short window of opportunity to self-correct and show that they are making “sufficient strides” toward religious hospitality. All institutional accreditors have a handbook of expectations. Religiously affiliated colleges need an additional section in their handbooks with expectations to indicate and measure the true state of liberal arts on their campus. This information could be made public to prospective students and guardians, as well as faculty and staff. This information, especially in its contextual significance compared to other similar colleges, would clarify the quality of liberal arts education at the college. Ricoeur’s approach to religious diversity is how we can lay out expectations for what are and are not sufficient strides from apathy to hospitality. For example, is there evidence of flexibility in institutional traditions, perhaps where alternative religious practices are employed at convocations and commencements? Are all

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graduates given a Christian bible for their graduation? What are the student organizations on campus? Are there courses on religions besides Christianity studied “on their own terms”? I do not want this to seem aimed solely at small Bible colleges. Asking questions and learning languages helps human beings maximally flourish, and so these topics have bigger stakes: religion’s relation to empowering humans toward better living in inclusive communities. My hope is that efforts like mine help mobilize greater coalitions of activists seeking promotion of and protection for inclusive cultural efforts. As we have seen, our Ricoeurian approach to religious multilingualism is a key contributor to such a coalition.

NOTES 1. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vols. 1–3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988); and Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). 2. Paul Ricoeur, “Religious Belief: The Difficult Path of the Religious,” in A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur, ed. Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 37. 3. See Paul Ricoeur, “Experience and Language in Religious Discourse,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, ed. Dominique Janicaud, et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 130. 4. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 28; see also Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986). 5. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 141. 6. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 35, my emphasis. 7. See Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 1998). 8. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 35. 9. See Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977). 10. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 34. 11. Pamela Sue Anderson. “Gender and the Infinite: On the Aspiration to Be All There Is,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 50 (2001): 191–212. 12. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 35. 13. Paul Ricoeur. “Philosophy of Religious Language,” Journal of Religion 54, no. 1 (1974): 71–85; and Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 57–60. 14. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 48. 15. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 54–55. 16. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 30.

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17. Ricoeur, “Experience and Language.” 18. Ricoeur, “Experience and Language,” 130. 19. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 37. 20. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 37. 21. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, rev. 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 460–461. 22. See Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 59. 23. Ricoeur, “Experience and Language,” 131. 24. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 38. 25. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 38. 26. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 38. 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, ed. Richard E. Palmer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 418. 28. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 38. 29. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 37. 30. Marrianne Moyaert, “Absorption or Hospitality: Two Approaches to the Tension between Identity and Alterity,” in Interreligious Hermeneutics, ed. Catherine Cornille and Christopher Conway (Eugene: Cascade, 2010), 86. 31. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 461. 32. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 37. 33. Ricoeur, “Experience and Language,” 133. 34. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 14. 35. See Nathan Eric Dickman, “Hermeneutic Priority and Phenomenological Indeterminacy of Questioning,” in The Significance of Indeterminacy: Perspectives from Asian and Continental Philosophy, ed. Robert H. Scott and Gregory S. Moss (New York: Routledge, 2018), 230. 36. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 310, emphasis mine. 37. Paul Tillich, “Communicating the Christian Message: A Question to Christian Ministers and Teachers,” in Theology of Culture. Edited by Robert C. Kimball. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 204–205. 38. See Dickman, “Hermeneutic Priority,” 230. 39. Cf. John Hick, “On Conflicting Religious Truth-Claims,” Religious Studies 19, no. 4 (1983): 485–491. 40. Ricoeur, “Religious Belief,” 36. 41. See The Dalai Lama, “Buddhism and Other Religions,” in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, ed. Michael Peterson et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 533–539. 42. See Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha Living Christ (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007). 43. National Association of Schools of Music [NASM], “Welcome to NASM,” 2019, retrieved from https://nasm​.arts​-accredit​.org/. 44. Susan D. Phillips and Kevin Kinser, “Many Masters: Who Controls Accreditation Policy?” Higher Ed Jobs, April 15, 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.hig​​hered​​jobs.​​ com​/b​​log​/p​​ostDi​​splay​​.cfm?​​post=​​​1906&​​blog=​​24.

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45. Antoinette Flores, “Accreditation is Broken. Time to Repair It,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 30, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.chr​​onicl​​e​.com​​/arti​​cle​/A​​ ccred​​itati​​on​-Is​​-Brok​​e​n​-Ti​​me​/24​​0086.​ 46. Rosemary Royston, personal communication, July 9, 2019. 47. Anya Kamenetz, “Defeated in Court, Education Dept. to Cancel $150 Million of Student Loan Debt,” NPR, December 14, 2018, retrieved from https​:/​/ww​​w​.npr​​ .org/​​2018/​​12​/14​​/6767​​55770​​/the-​​educa​​tion-​​depar​​tment​​-is​-c​​ancel​​ing​-1​​50​-mi​​llion​​-of​​-s​​ tuden​​t​-loa​​n​-deb​​t. 48. See Allison Roda and Amy Stuart Wells, “School Choice Policies and Racial Segregation: Where White Parents’ Good Intentions, Anxiety, and Privilege Collide,” American Journal of Education 119 (2013): 261–293. 49. Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges [SACSCOC], “FAQs,” 2018, http:​/​/www​​.sacs​​coc​.o​​rg​/FA​​Qsans​​wers.​​​asp​#q​​1, my emphasis. 50. Council for Higher Education Accreditation [CHEA], “Degree Mills: An Old Problem & A New Threat,” 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.che​​a​.org​​/degr​​ee​-mi​​lls​-o​​ld​-pr​​oblem​​​ -new-​​threa​​t, my emphasis. 51. Council for Higher Education Accreditation. 52. Council for Higher Education Accreditation, my emphasis. 53. American Association of University Professors [AAUP], “About the AAUP,” 2019, https://www​.aaup​.org​/about​-aaup. 54. Colleen Flaherty, “Punishing Alleged Violations of Tenure, Academic Freedom and Governance,” Inside Higher Ed, June 17, 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ins​​idehi​​ ghere​​d​.com​​/news​​/2019​​/06​/1​​7​/aau​​p​-vot​​es​-ce​​nsure​​-or​-s​​ancti​​on​-th​​ree​-i​​nstit​​uti​on​​s​-its​​ -annu​​al​-me​​eting​. 55. Flaherty, “Punishing Alleged Violations of Tenure,” 2019. 56. See, for example, Admin, “Richmont Receives Highest Form of Accreditation Available to Counseling Programs Nationwide,” School of Counseling News, 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ric​​hmont​​.edu/​​richm​​ont​-r​​eceiv​​es​-hi​​ghest​​-form​​-accr​​edita​​tion-​​avail​​able-​​ couns​​eling​​-pro​g​​rams-​​natio​​nwide​/. 57. Naropa University, “About Naropa,” 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nar​​opa​.e​​du​/ab​​out​-n​​ aropa​​/​inde​​x​.php​. 58. Maharishi University of Management, “Catalog 2018–2019,” 2019, https:// www​.mum​.edu​/catalog. 59. Dafina Lazarus Stewart, Michael M. Kocet, and Sharon Lobdell, “The Multifaith Campus: Transforming Colleges and Universities for Spiritual Engagement,” About Campus, March–April, 2011, 10–18. 60. Nathan Eric Dickman, “Prioritizing Questions for Religious Literacy at United Methodist-Affiliated Colleges,” in Intersections: Faith, Church, and the Academy, ed. Mark E. Hanshaw and Timothy S. Moore (Nashville: General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, 2018), 98. 61. Stewart, Kocet, and Lobdell, “The Multifaith Campus,” 13. 62. Eboo Patel, Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America (Boston: Beacon, 2013), 68.

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63. Pew Research Center, “Americans Express Increasingly Warm Feelings Toward Religious Groups,” February 15, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​forum​​.org/​​2017/​​02​ /15​​/amer​​icans​​-expr​​ess​-i​​ncrea​​singl​​y​-war​​m​-fee​​lings​​-towa​​rd​​-re​​ligio​​us​-gr​​oups/​. 64. See Faisal Aqlan et al., “An Ergonomic Study of Body Motions during Muslim Prayer Using Digital Human Modelling,” International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering 25, no. 3 (2017): 279–296. 65. Robert Wuthnow, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 66. See Anouar Majid, “Educating Ourselves into Coexistence,” Association of American Colleges and Universities [AACU], Diversity & Democracy: Civic Learning for Shared Futures 11, no. 1 (winter 2008), https​:/​/ww​​w​.aac​​u​.org​​/dive​​rsity​​ democ​​racy/​​2008/​​win​te​​r​/maj​​id. 67. See Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t (New York: HarperOne, 2007). 68. Pew Research Center, “U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey: Executive Summary,” Religion and Public Life, September 28, 2010, https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​forum​​ .org/​​2010/​​09​/28​​/u​-s-​​relig​​ious-​​knowl​​​edge-​​surve​​y/. 69. See Lisa Miller, “We Are All Hindus Now,” Newsweek, August 15, 2009, Questia, https​:/​/ww​​w​.que​​stia.​​com​/m​​agazi​​ne​/1G​​1​-205​​98629​​7​/we-​​are​-a​​​ll​-hi​​ndus-​​now. 70. See Michael Lipka, “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Religious ‘Nones’,” Pew Research Center, May 13, 2015, https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​resea​​rch​.o​​rg​/fa​​ct​-ta​​ nk​/20​​15​/05​​/13​/a​​-clos​​er​-lo​​ok​-at​​-amer​​icas-​​rapid​​ly​-gr​​​owing​​-reli​​gious​​-none​​s/. 71. R. Eugene Rice, “Religious Diversity and the Making of Meaning: Implications for the Classroom,” in Association of American Colleges and Universities [AACU], Diversity & Democracy: Civic Learning for Shared Futures 11, no. 1 (winter 2008), https​:/​/ww​​w​.aac​​u​.org​​/dive​​rsity​​democ​​racy/​​2008/​​wi​nte​​r​/ric​​e. 72. Melanie B. Overton, Handbook for Leaders at United Methodist-related Schools, Colleges, and Universities: Understanding, Energizing, and Communicating the Relationship (Nashville: General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, 2016), 3, my emphasis. 73. Overton, Handbook for Leaders, 9. 74. Overton, Handbook for Leaders, 9. 75. Human Resources, “Be a Part of Our Learning Community,” Huntingdon College Employment, 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.hun​​tingd​​on​.ed​​u​/abo​​ut​-hu​​nting​​don​-c​​olleg​​​e​/ emp​​loyme​​nt/; my emphasis. 76. National Association of Schools and Colleges of the United Methodist Church [NASCUMC], “Joint Statement of NASCUMC Member Presidents on the Called General Conference and the Subject of Human Sexuality,” General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, January 5, 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.gbh​​em​.or​​g​/sit​​es​/de​​ fault​​/file​​s​/nas​​cumc.​​presi​​dents​​.join​​​tstat​​ement​​.pdf,​ my emphasis. 77. See Elizabeth Redden, “Dilemma for Methodist Colleges,” Inside Higher Ed, March 11, 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ins​​idehi​​ghere​​d​.com​​/news​​/2019​​/03​/1​​1​/met​​hodis​​t​-col​​ leges​​-and-​​semin​​aries​​-reac​​t​-chu​​rch​-v​​ote​-s​​treng​​​theni​​ng​-pr​​ohibi​​tions​​-gay.​ 78. Manya Brachear Pashman, “Wheaton College Reverses Efforts to Fire Professor, but She Won’t Return to Teach,” The Chicago Tribune, February 6, 2016.

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79. See Charles Hermes, “The APA and Discrimination Against Homosexuals . . . Again,” Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, February 12, 2009, https​:/​/le​​iterr​​eport​​ s​.typ​​epad.​​com​/b​​log​/2​​009​/0​​2​/the​​-apa-​​and​-d​​iscri​​minat​​ion​-a​​gains​​t​-ho​m​​osexu​​alsag​​ain​ .h​​tml. 80. Wheaton College, “Community Covenant,” About Wheaton, 2019, https​:/​/ ww​​w​.whe​​aton.​​edu​/a​​bout-​​wheat​​on​/co​​mmuni​​ty​​-co​​venan​​t/. 81. See Mark Murphy, “A Letter to the American Philosophical Association Board of Officers,” 2009, http:​/​/fac​​ulty.​​georg​​etown​​.edu/​​murph​​ym​/AP​​AStat​​ement​​ -Mu​rp​​hy​.ht​​m. 82. Peter Conn, “The Great Accreditation Farce,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 30, 2014, https​:/​/ww​​w​.chr​​onicl​​e​.com​​/arti​​cle​/T​​he​-Gr​​eat​-A​​ccred​​itati​​ on​​-Fa​​rce​/1​​47425​. 83. Conn, “The Great Accreditation Farce,” 2014. 84. See Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, The Principles of Accreditation: Foundations for Quality Enhancement, 5th ed., 2011, 23–25, https​:/​/sa​​cscoc​​.org/​​app​/u​​pload​​s​/201​​9​/08/​​2018P​​rinci​​plesO​​fAcre​​​ditat​​ion​.p​​df. 85. J. Cameron West, “Jesus, the Big Questions, and United Methodist-related Higher Education,” in Conversations: Leading United Methodist-related Schools, Colleges, and Universities, ed. M. Kathryn Armistead and Melanie B. Overton (Nashville: General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, 2015), 60. 86. West, “Jesus, the Big Questions,” 60. 87. West, “Jesus, the Big Questions,” 59. 88. West, “Jesus, the Big Questions,” 61. 89. West, “Jesus, the Big Questions,” 61, my emphasis. 90. See Edna Chun and Alvin Evans, Diverse Administrators in Peril: The New Indentured Class in Higher Education (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Marybeth Gasman, Ufuoma Abiola, and Christopher Traves, “Diversity and Senior Leadership at Elite Institutions of Higher Education,” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 8, no. 1 (2015): 1–14. 91. See Dickman, “Prioritizing Questions for Religious Literacy.” 92. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 3–8. 93. See Aristotle, “On the Soul,” The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Edition, ed. Jonathon Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 94. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 165. 95. Augustine, The Essential Augustine, ed. Vernon J. Bourke, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974), 26. 96. Stewart et al., “The Multifaith Campus,” 12. 97. Stewart et al., “The Multifaith Campus,” 12. 98. See Stewart et al., “The Multifaith Campus,” 14. 99. Stewart et al., “The Multifaith Campus,” 14. 100. Allie Grasgreen, “Faith Reconsidered,” Inside Higher Ed, April 1, 2011, https​ :/​/ww​​w​.ins​​idehi​​ghere​​d​.com​​/news​​/2011​​/04​/0​​1​/fai​​th​-​re​​consi​​dered​. 101. Rosemary Royston, personal communication, July 9, 2019.

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Hanshaw and Timothy S. Moore, 97–130. Nashville: General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, 2018. Flaherty, Colleen. “Punishing Alleged Violations of Tenure, Academic Freedom and Governance.” Inside Higher Ed, June 17, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.ins​​idehi​​ghere​​d​.com​​/ news​​/2019​​/06​/1​​7​/aau​​p​-vot​​es​-ce​​nsure​​-or​-s​​ancti​​on​-th​​ree​-i​​nstit​​utio​n​​s​-its​​-annu​​al​-me​​ eting​. Flores, Antoinette. “Accreditation is Broken. Time to Repair It.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 30, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.chr​​onicl​​e​.com​​/arti​​cle​/A​​ccred​​itati​​on​ -Is​​-Brok​​en​​-Ti​​me​/24​​0086. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings. Edited by Richard E. Palmer. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. ———. Truth and Method, revised 2nd ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Gasman, Marybeth, Ufuoma Abiola, and Christopher Traves. “Diversity and Senior Leadership at Elite Institutions of Higher Education.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 8, no. 1 (2015): 1–14. Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977. Grasgreen, Allie. “Faith Reconsidered.” Inside Higher Ed, April 1, 2011. https​:/​/ww​​ w​.ins​​idehi​​ghere​​d​.com​​/news​​/2011​​/04​/0​​1​/fai​​th​-r​e​​consi​​dered​. Hanshaw, Mark E., and Timothy S. Moore, eds. Intersections: Faith, Church, and the Academy. Nashville: General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, 2018. Hermes, Charles. “The APA and Discrimination Against Homosexuals . . . Again.” Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog. February 12, 2009. https​:/​/le​​iterr​​eport​​s​.typ​​epad.​​ com​/b​​log​/2​​009​/0​​2​/the​​-apa-​​and​-d​​iscri​​minat​​ion​-a​​gains​​t​-ho​m​​osexu​​alsag​​ain​.h​​tml. Hick, John. “On Conflicting Religious Truth-Claims.” Religious Studies 19, no. 4 (1983): 485–491. Human Resources. “Be a Part of Our Learning Community.” Huntingdon College Employment. 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.hun​​tingd​​on​.ed​​u​/abo​​ut​-hu​​nting​​don​-c​​olleg​​e​​/emp​​ loyme​​nt/. Janicaud, Dominique, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Paul Ricoeur. Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. Kamenetz, Anya. “Defeated in Court, Education Dept. to Cancel $150 Million of Student Loan Debt.” NPR. December 14, 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.npr​​.org/​​2018/​​12​/14​​/6767​​55770​​/ the-​​educa​​tion-​​depar​​tment​​-is​-c​​ancel​​ing​-1​​50​-mi​​llion​​-of​​-s​​tuden​​t​-loa​​n​-deb​​t. Lipka, Michael. “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Religious ‘Nones.’” Pew Research Center. May 13, 2015. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​resea​​rch​.o​​rg​/fa​​ct​-ta​​nk​/20​​15​ /05​​/13​/a​​-clos​​er​-lo​​ok​-at​​-amer​​icas-​​rapid​​ly​-gr​​​owing​​-reli​​gious​​-none​​s/. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Maharishi University of Management. “Catalog 2018-2019.” 2019. https://www​ .mum​.edu​/catalog. Majid, Anouar. “Educating Ourselves into Coexistence.” In Association of American Colleges and Universities [AACU], Diversity & Democracy: Civic Learning for

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Shared Futures 11, no. 1 (winter 2008). https​:/​/ww​​w​.aac​​u​.org​​/dive​​rsity​​democ​​racy/​​ 2008/​​wint​e​​r​/maj​​id. Miller, Lisa. “We Are All Hindus Now.” Newsweek, August 15, 2009. Questia. https​ :/​/ww​​w​.que​​stia.​​com​/m​​agazi​​ne​/1G​​1​-205​​98629​​7​/we-​​are​-a​​​ll​-hi​​ndus-​​now. Moyaert, Marrianne. “Absorption or Hospitality: Two Approaches to the Tension between Identity and Alterity.” In Interreligious Hermeneutics, Edited by Catherine Cornille and Christopher Conway. Eugene: Cascade, 2010. Murphy, Mark. “A Letter to the American Philosophical Association Board of Officers.” 2009. http:​/​/fac​​ulty.​​georg​​etown​​.edu/​​murph​​ym​/AP​​AStat​​ement​​-Mu​rp​​hy​ .ht​​m. Naropa University. “About Naropa.” 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nar​​opa​.e​​du​/ab​​out​-n​​aropa​​/i​ nde​​x​.php​. National Association of Schools and Colleges of the United Methodist Church [NASCUMC]. Joint Statement of NASCUMC Member Presidents on the Called General Conference and the Subject of Human Sexuality. Nashville: General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. January 5, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.gbh​​em​.or​​g​/sit​​es​/ de​​fault​​/file​​s​/nas​​cumc.​​presi​​dents​​.join​​​tstat​​ement​​.pdf. National Association of Schools of Music [NASM]. “Welcome to NASM.” 2019. https://nasm​.arts​-accredit​.org/. Overton, Melanie B. Handbook for Leaders at United Methodist-related Schools, Colleges, and Universities: Understanding, Energizing, and Communicating the Relationship. Nashville: General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, 2016. Pashman, Manya Brachear. “Wheaton College Reverses Efforts to Fire Professor, but She Won’t Return to Teach.” The Chicago Tribune, February 6, 2016. Patel, Eboo. Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America. Boston: Beacon, 2013. Peterson, Michael, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Basinger, eds., Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pew Research Center. “Americans Express Increasingly Warm Feelings Toward Religious Groups.” February 15, 2017. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​forum​​.org/​​2017/​​02​/15​​/ amer​​icans​​-expr​​ess​-i​​ncrea​​singl​​y​-war​​m​-fee​​lings​​-towa​​rd​​-re​​ligio​​us​-gr​​oups/​. ———. “U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey: Executive Summary.” Religion and Public Life. September 28, 2010. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pew​​forum​​.org/​​2010/​​09​/28​​/u​-s-​​relig​​ ious-​​knowl​​e​dge-​​surve​​y/. Phillips, Susan D., and Kevin Kinser. “Many Masters: Who Controls Accreditation Policy?” Higher Ed Jobs, April 15, 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.hig​​hered​​jobs.​​com​/b​​log​/p​​ ostDi​​splay​​.cfm?​​post=​​1​906&​​blog=​​24. Prothero, Stephen. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t. New York: HarperOne, 2007. Redden, Elizabeth. “Dilemma for Methodist Colleges.” Inside Higher Ed. March 11, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.ins​​idehi​​ghere​​d​.com​​/news​​/2019​​/03​/1​​1​/met​​hodis​​t​-col​​leges​​-and-​​ semin​​aries​​-reac​​t​-chu​​rch​-v​​ote​-s​​treng​​​theni​​ng​-pr​​ohibi​​tions​​-gay. Rice, R. Eugene. “Religious Diversity and the Making of Meaning: Implications for the Classroom.” In Association of American Colleges and Universities [AACU],

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Diversity & Democracy: Civic Learning for Shared Futures 11, no. 1 (winter, 2008), https​:/​/ww​​w​.aac​​u​.org​​/dive​​rsity​​democ​​racy/​​2008/​​win​te​​r​/ric​​e. Ricoeur, Paul. “Experience and Language in Religious Discourse.” In Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate. Edited by Dominique Janicaud, et al., 127–146. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. ———. Fallible Man. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press, 1986. ———. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976). ———. “Philosophy of Religious Language.” The Journal of Religion 54, no. 1 (1974): 71–85. ———. “Religious Belief: The Difficult Path of the Religious.” In A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur. Edited by Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema, 27–40. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. ———. Time and Narrative, vols. 1–3. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988. Roda, Allison, and Amy Stuart Wells. “School Choice Policies and Racial Segregation: Where White Parents’ Good Intentions, Anxiety, and Privilege Collide.” American Journal of Education 119 (2013): 261–293. Scott, Robert H., and Gregory S. Moss, eds. The Significance of Indeterminacy: Perspectives from Asian and Continental Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018. Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges [SACSCOC]. “FAQs.” 2018. http:​/​/www​​.sacs​​coc​.o​​rg​/FA​​Qsans​​wers.​​​asp​#q​​1. ———. The Principles of Accreditation: Foundations for Quality Enhancement, 5th ed. 2011. https​:/​/sa​​cscoc​​.org/​​app​/u​​pload​​s​/201​​9​/08/​​2018P​​rinci​​plesO​​fAcre​​​ditat​​ion​ .p​​df. Stewart, Dafina Lazarus, Michael M. Kocet, and Sharon Lobdell. “The Multifaith Campus: Transforming Colleges and Universities for Spiritual Engagement.” About Campus, March-April, 2011, 10–18. Thich Nhat Hanh. Living Buddha Living Christ. New York: Riverhead, 2007. Tillich, Paul. “Communicating the Christian Message: A Question to Christian Ministers and Teachers.” In Theology of Culture, 201–213. Edited by Robert C. Kimball. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. ———. Dynamics of Faith. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Treanor, Brian, and Henry Isaac Venema, eds. A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. West, J. Cameron. “Jesus, the Big Questions, and United Methodist-related Higher Education.” In Conversations: Leading United Methodist-related Schools, Colleges, and Universities. Edited by M. Kathryn Armistead and Melanie B. Overton, 57–64. Nashville: General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, 2015. Wheaton College. “Community Covenant.” About Wheaton. 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.whe​​ aton.​​edu​/a​​bout-​​wheat​​on​/co​​mmuni​​ty​​-co​​venan​​t/. Wuthnow, Robert. America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Chapter 11

Interpreting with and for Others Institutional Research as Hermeneutical Reasoning Kenneth A. Reynhout

The focus of this chapter is an area of higher education known as institutional research, commonly referred to as “IR.” Work in IR takes many different forms, including activities like academic assessment, curriculum scheduling, accreditation compliance, enrollment forecasting, financial planning, and program review. Institutions of all sizes are increasingly relying on quantitative methods in order to remain competitive in a challenging and shifting higher education market characterized by smaller pools of prospective students, dropping enrollments, increasing costs, rising consumer expectations, burgeoning student loan debt, greater government and accreditation oversight, and a general sense of unease about institutional effectiveness, viability, and sustainability.1 Under these pressures, IR is becoming more important and more central to the way the business of higher education is conducted today, so our attention in this context is warranted. As we consider the future of higher education and imagine the possible realization of a just university it is important to ask, what would it mean for institutional research to be “just”? In Oneself as Another Paul Ricoeur famously defines the purpose of ethics as “aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions.”2 Later, in his preface to The Just, he explains that this approach was placed at the intersection of two “orthogonal axes,” or dimensions. One dimension is the “dialogical constitution of the self,” the fact that each of us is an inherently relational being that depends on others to realize our truest identity. The second is the “hierarchical constitution of the predicates that qualify human actions in terms of morality.” This dimension is necessary because behavioral guidelines (norms, mores, laws, etc.) are needed to address the pragmatic demands of social existence. For simplicity, I 237

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will refer to these as the relational and pragmatic dimensions of institutional life, respectively. Ricoeur contends that a full-throated ethics, one capable of supporting and promoting justice, must account for both.3 With respect to these dimensions, Ricoeur argues two conditions must be met if we hope to see justice realized in an institutional context. The first condition is that generally speaking the relational dimension must have priority over the pragmatic. Our collective desire to live the good life must first and foremost be oriented toward one another and our mutual well-being. Institutional rules of behavior and engagement, as important as they may be, should not become ends in themselves but must regularly rediscover their fount and purpose in promoting the good life with and for others. Ricoeur’s second condition is that the “others” at issue cannot merely be friends or even those with whom we have direct interpersonal relationships but must also include strangers. “The other for friendship is the ‘you’; the other for justice is ‘anyone.’”4 I want to press these points in relation to IR by examining and evaluating how the relational and pragmatic dimensions are made manifest in the practice of institutional research in a university setting. The parts of Ricoeur’s philosophy that I leverage for this task are not his musings on just institutions found in Oneself as Another and his later work, but rather his many earlier reflections on hermeneutics. An excavation of the character of the hermeneutical subject that is presupposed in Ricoeur’s ethics is helpful here. Ricoeur notes that the person who aims to live a good life is engaged in a kind of self-interpretation because one’s choices to act one way or another are necessarily interpretations of oneself in relation to the world. To capture this hermeneutical reflexivity, Ricoeur refers to the ethical aim toward living well as “self-esteem.”5 Furthermore, since any reasonable alignment with the good is not solitary but necessarily implicates others, a lived ethic must also be “with and for others.” Ricoeur refers to this orientation to the other as “solicitude,” which necessarily accompanies self-esteem: “self-esteem and solicitude cannot be experienced or reflected upon one without the other.”6 For an institution to be counted as just it must, at the very least, elevate solicitude above other concerns. It must promote the relational dimension of institutional life—the “with and for others”—to a position of priority and prominence above the pragmatic dimension. This is an especially difficult thing to ask of a field like IR, which seems to be so thoroughly pragmatic in its attention to data, processes, and the pursuit of efficiency. However, institutional research does not have to be characterized in this way. In fact, the thesis of this chapter is that IR is thoroughly and profoundly hermeneutical, which has important implications for how institutional researchers should understand themselves, their roles, and the moral norms that govern their work if they are to be contributing members of a just university community.

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The argument is built in three stages. First, I characterize the field of IR as organizational intelligence, following a common model in the field. Second, I summarize Ricoeur’s definition of interpretation as understanding through explanation, an influential aspect of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory. Third, I combine the results of the first two sections to illuminate the deeply hermeneutical quality of IR practiced in the context of an institution that has real human beings as its origin, condition, and goal. This reorients the discipline around an originary human context and a concern for the well-being of people, a just privileging of the relational over the pragmatic. As such, institutional research is recast as interpreting with and for others. 1. INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH AS ORGANIZATIONAL INTELLIGENCE The character, scope, and structure of institutional research can look very different from one school to the next, depending on an institution’s type, size, history, culture, organization, finances, and other characteristics. A large research university that serves both undergraduate and graduate students, for example, may have the luxury of a centralized department of research with a team of people that can serve multiple administrative functions, staff offices, and/or academic departments. Smaller schools may have only one or two people doing this kind of work, and it is also common for professors or administrators to have IR responsibilities added to their primary roles and functions. Institutions structure themselves and distribute responsibilities in a myriad of ways, and so individuals and institutions may experience the work and value of IR quite differently. My interest is the more or less common characteristics of this work, the qualities that tend to be universal regardless of location or circumstance. Specifically, institutional research in its many flavors involves the use of quantitative methods of various sorts, particularly the measurement, collection, storage, representation, and utilization of data for different purposes such as compliance, reporting, and decision-making. This data can take many forms, including (but not limited to) enrollment markers like admissions, retention, and graduation rates; financial data tied to revenue, expenses, human resource costs, or capital expenditures; and assessment measurements of student learning, student experience, program effectiveness, and the like. Generally speaking, if there is a way to measure something, and if measuring that thing can possibly help a school better attend to its mission, serve its students, or otherwise achieve its goals, then IR is the discipline tasked with achieving those ends. Patrick Terenzini has proposed a model of institutional research that is structured around the metaphor of “organizational intelligence,” which

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broadly refers “to the data gathered about an institution, to their analysis and transformation into information, and to the insight and informed sense of the organization that a competent institutional researcher brings to the interpretation of that information.”7 The three components of this definition correspond to three levels or “tiers” of intelligence, which he refers to as “technical/ analytical intelligence,” “issues intelligence,” and “contextual intelligence.” These tiers are telescopically organized such that a higher tier builds upon and subsumes the tier or tiers below it. Each tier is focused on a particular form of evidence (data, information, and interpretations) and therefore different kinds of knowledge and competencies are required for the researcher to be effective in each case. Terenzini’s model has proven influential in the field8 and for our purposes will provide a useful way to both introduce IR and give structure to our analysis. The first tier of technical/analytical intelligence is associated with the most basic type of knowledge required for effective institutional research. It involves attention to familiar data points that most institutions collect and report in order to remain in compliance and good standing with various government entities and accreditation organizations. For example, universities who participate in the Title IV federal financial aid program must routinely report measures related to enrollments, finances, and resources to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Such regulatory requirements tend to force most institutions to support IR at this rudimentary level. Because dealing with data is a fundamental activity for institutional researchers, skills in mathematics, statistical methods, technology, information systems, and social science research are essential for their work. However, Terenzini warns that data by itself has “little utility or value.” Research restricted to this tier would have little impact because it would be limited to “data without information, processes without purposes, analyses without problems, and answers without questions.”9 Hence, for most institutions effective IR requires a higher form of organizational intelligence beyond mere data collection. The domain of the second tier is issues intelligence, so-called because at this level technical data is brought to bear on the types of issues with which universities often wrestle. Institutions regularly use data to reflect on how the present situation measures up to past goals, and how they might imagine different potential futures given its present state. As one example of many, schools routinely ask whether or not to increase tuition from one year to the next, and if so by how much. Having access to accurate data is greatly beneficial for addressing an issue like this, but simply throwing data at problems is not sufficient for effective administration. Each issue must be analyzed, scoped, and refined on its own merits and data measures identified that can provide reasonable guidance. Terenzini argues that this is what distinguishes

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the second tier from the first: issues intelligence involves the transformation of data into information, which happens when data is given meaning in reference to an organizational issue. Doing this well requires a degree of both organizational and social intelligence. Effective IR leaders know how higher educational institutions are organized and the ways different areas of a university overlap, communicate, and depend on one another to function properly. Moreover, they are able to get things done because they also have the ability “to work successfully with other people (both individually and in groups) to accomplish some goal.”10 The third and most sophisticated form of organizational intelligence is contextual intelligence. Terenzini describes this as the level where information is interpreted within the particularity of the researcher’s own institution, including its historical development, philosophical evolution, faculty and staff culture, and all of the explicit and implicit norms, codes, customs, and processes therein. Thinking contextually is needed in order to sensitively transform information into strategic decisions and meaningful action in a real institutional setting. It is what “makes possible the prudent, intelligent, and illuminating application of technical and methodological intelligence to locally meaningful versions of general issues.”11 This involves paying attention to all the people who intersect with one’s work, including not only students, administration, faculty, and staff but also those who represent “external” constituencies such as the governing board, prospective students, graduate alumni/ae, donors, partner affiliates, and the local community. As such, productivity in this tier is aided by skills like cultural awareness, emotional intelligence, and intercultural competence. Overall, an effective IR leader will be a skilled contextual interpreter of information built on data. This way of modeling IR as organizational intelligence is briefly summarized in table 11.1. Note that the second level requires and depends on the first, and the third level requires and depends on the lower two. As one moves from the lowest to the highest tier, we observe greater attention to meaning, context, and institutional action. A competent institutional researcher should be able to navigate within each of these tiers, and an effective IR leader will Table 11.1  Institutional Research as Organizational Intelligence Tier

Form

Primary Purpose

Contextual Intelligence

Interpretations = information in context Information = data given meaning Data = fundamental measures

Informing strategic planning and decision-making Addressing issues

Issues Intelligence Technical/Analytical Intelligence

Reporting and compliance

Source: Adapted by the author from Patrick T. Terenzini, “Nature,” 1–10.

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seek to build the infrastructure and culture required to support contextually sensitive, strategic decision-making that envelops the entirety of this landscape. There is much to be commended about this model. It correctly recognizes the fact that data only becomes beneficial when it used to address issues in an actual institutional context. This underlines the importance of thinking contextually and working with people to solve real problems, which can be a challenge for those who are more narrowly inclined to focus on numbers and technology. However, despite the attention given to people and context Terenzini’s model still favors the pragmatic dimension over the relational, which as we have seen is a barrier to promoting just institutional practices. The privileging of the pragmatic can be seen in the way that the model is built vertically, so to speak, around types of evidence (data, information, interpretations), which suggests that (1) data is fundamentally what IR is all about and (2) a researcher’s primary role is to transform data into actionable information. This is not only misleading, as I will begin to argue in the next section, but it also neglects the human dimension and the importance of solicitude. The importance of people in the model is limited to their utilitarian value as either consumers of information, variables in mathematical models, or resources to negotiate with or manage around. To be fair, Terenzini’s model was intended as pure description and not as commentary on professional ethics or human dignity. Nevertheless, it is still fair to point out that on the model’s own terms one could possess a high degree of organizational intelligence and great skills across all three tiers and still not care about or work on behalf of others and their well-being. The model also does not address the fact that the IR professionals are themselves humans with values who take direction from other humans with values, even though such values profoundly influence the way an institution operates. It is human beings who decide which people deserve our keenest attention, which issues are prioritized, how issues are articulated, and which measurements are scrutinized. As such, the human context and relational dimension must be emphasized and prioritized if we have any hope of shaping just practices around the use of data. Articulating a hermeneutical model of IR promises to assist us in this quest. 2. INTERPRETATION AS UNDERSTANDING THROUGH EXPLANATION We have already seen enough to conclude that hermeneutics—the field of study devoted to questions related to interpretation theory and practice—is clearly implicated in the work of institutional research. This was especially

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obvious in Terenzini’s highest tier of contextual intelligence, where “interpretation” was the term used to describe how information becomes strategic organizational intelligence through prudent attention to context. This is certainly a kind of interpretation, but the model could misleadingly imply that interpretation only happens at this highest level, which in turn could reinforce a stereotype that suggests that analysis of data and information is categorically separate from hermeneutical dynamics. With the assistance of Ricoeur I want to suggest a more profound role for hermeneutics in the enterprise of IR, one that encompasses and structures all three tiers of organizational intelligence. Considered holistically, IR is a kind of hermeneutical reasoning or process of interpretation. In the next section, I will build and explore the implications of this claim as it relates to our quest for just university practices, but here I want to first lay a foundation by appealing to Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation. Summarizing Ricoeur’s approach to hermeneutics is a daunting task, given the mountain of writings that he devoted to the topic over his long career, so I will simplify things by focusing our attention on one notable feature of his many publications on interpretation. This feature is Ricoeur’s penchant for describing interpretation as a process that involves both understanding and explanation. Elsewhere I have argued that this aspect of his work is the most persistent and cogent unifying principle of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, evident both in his theoretical descriptions and in his own methods.12 If I am justified in this claim it will benefit the uninformed reader to learn of Ricoeur’s way of connecting explanation with understanding, but my reasons for highlighting it here have more to do with its utility. Once defined and described, I will show how this process maps very neatly onto the model of IR outlined in the previous section. This, in turn, will give concrete support for and shape to the claim that institutional research is thoroughly and profoundly hermeneutical. Since serious philosophical scholarship can be difficult to understand in the best of circumstances I will attempt to use as much nontechnical language as possible while remaining faithful to Ricoeur’s work. Toward that end, I will actually utilize a strategy that he himself used, which is to describe these ideas through the metaphorical use of a more familiar activity: the reading of a text. By “text” we are referring not only to a short message sent between electronic devices but also to any instance of written discourse. Ricoeur prompts us to question: how does one interpret meaning in the act of reading a text? And when is one’s interpretation of a text justified? Historically, these kinds of questions were inspired by the reading of classical and sacred texts, such as Homer’s epic tales, the Hebrew scriptures, or the books of the New Testament. The ancient and sometimes enigmatic character of these texts made interpretation difficult and disagreements about meaning commonplace. Scholars that specialize in the study of these

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texts have long searched for clues to a good and right interpretation, a set of criteria or rules that could reliably guide one to correct meaning. Attempted answers have varied widely, in part because individual texts are so different from one to the next. Philosophers for their part have tried to step back from these highly particular discussions and ask more universal questions about the shape and character of interpretation in general, regardless of the text in question, and even beyond texts to any hermeneutical situation. This is the area of study known as “philosophical hermeneutics.” Within philosophical hermeneutics the term understanding has taken on a more or less technical meaning in reference to the overall goal of interpretation. In other words, the purpose of reading, of assigning meaning, of interpretation, is understanding. We read so that we can understand. Using the term in this way can sometimes create confusion because the word “understanding” is not at all technical in ordinary speech. It can mean many things, including academic knowledge, sympathy, empathy, agreement, or psychic connection, in addition to the comprehension of meaning. Nevertheless, for our purposes, here it is most important to know that understanding is the goal of interpretation, and hermeneutics is the area of study devoted to articulating what understanding is, where it occurs, how it works, and when it works well.13 In the philosophical tradition that Ricoeur inherited it had become commonplace to define understanding in contrast to explanation, a term which had adopted its own technical meaning in philosophy of science. On this view, the purpose of the natural sciences is to produce explanations, which are verifiably accurate descriptions of natural phenomena obtained through the careful testing and measurement processes characteristic of the scientific method. An explanation produced by science was considered objectively true, whereas the understanding associated with interpretation was seen to be subjective and contestable. This way of construing things created problems for disciplines like history, which has scientific aspirations yet relies on interpretation because the historical record is often incomplete, causation is difficult to define and establish, human behavior is complex, and human motivations are enigmatic. Nevertheless, the distinction was more or less taken for granted such that practitioners of the so-called “human sciences” were forced to argue that understanding could still be considered scientific on other grounds, even without the luxury of explanation. In Ricoeur’s estimation too much had been made of this stark contrast between explanation and understanding, arguing that these two ideas are not in fact wholly separate or alien to one another. His primary concern was the way in which explanation had been separated from understanding in discussions around interpretation, which inevitably led to hermeneutical theories

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and methods that either aimed at establishing the intentions of the text’s original author or argued for the complete liberation of the reader. Ricoeur finds both approaches profoundly inadequate, arguing that any compelling interpretation of meaning cannot be based on a phantom connection to an absentee author nor on the mere whimsy of the reader. Part of Ricoeur’s proposed solution to this quandary is to clarify the nature of explanation and use that to rehabilitate a role for explanation in the act of interpreting texts. We “explain,” he suggests, whenever we attempt to describe or explicate something based on its objective structure and constituent parts. Here the term “objective” does not imply certainty, but rather that there are qualities present that are relatively stable and more or less universally available. Thus understood, natural scientists are not the only ones engaged in explanation. For readers and interpreters of texts, explanation is based in the objectivity of the text itself. Interpretations are anchored in texts, and a given text does not change from one reading to the next. The text therefore presents itself as a more or less fixed point, an objective center of gravity to which a responsible interpreter will repeatedly return in the discernment of meaning. Moreover, a particular text has a fixed form. It uses specific words and phrases, uses a grammar, employs figures of speech, and deploys compositional devices that were available to the context and language of its original production. Not all of these elements are equally available or comprehensible to every reader, especially when the text is distant from the reader in terms of era, language, culture, and so on, but that doesn’t change the fact that these elements are there and remain there in the text regardless of reader or circumstance. Ricoeur contends that when a reader gives attention to and explicates these fixed, structural elements of a text, which an accomplished reader does quite naturally, they are engaging in a kind of explanatory process. Understanding a text therefore relies on explanation as a matter of course. Ricoeur uses this insight to define interpretation as a kind of back-and-forth process between understanding and explanation;14 or as I have elsewhere paraphrased it, interpretation is understanding through explanation.15 One of the better-known images Ricoeur uses to describe this dynamic is a “hermeneutical arc,”16 which is helpful because it emphasizes how understanding acts as both origin and destination for explanation. Briefly, the reader of a text begins with some understanding, moves through explanation, and finishes at a new (and hopefully better) form of understanding. Interpreters begin with understanding because they bring to the task their prejudices about the text, knowledge of the text’s original language and context, assumptions, sociocultural biases, and all of the other factors that make up their perception of

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themselves and the world they inhabit. This “pre-understanding” influences the how readers will engage the content of a text, including the kinds of explanations they will seek or notice and how those explanatory elements are deployed. Sometimes this has little noticeable effect on outcomes, but different pre-understandings can also lead to very different interpretations from one person to the next. In any case, the interpretive process does not stay with explanation but always returns to understanding. The interpreter’s goal is that this new understanding, the destination of their hermeneutical arc, is better than the understanding they started with, such that the discernment process results in producing meaning that is both more faithful to the text and conducive to an improved self-understanding for the reader. Interpretation is the process that encapsulates the entire arc: (pre-)understanding → explanation → (new) understanding. Explanation is thus not antithetical to understanding but is in fact a necessary part of the hermeneutical process. As Ricoeur once put it, “to explain more is to understand better.”17 For their part, explanations are also powerless without understanding. Even the most objective and mathematical of the hard sciences does not produce explanations in splendid isolation, but rather as possible answers to practical questions. Ricoeur did not comment on the natural sciences very much, but contemporary philosophy of science has largely accepted the fact that science is performed in sociocultural contexts that give shape and direction to practicing scientists. These contexts establish frameworks of understanding within which certain questions are asked, answers are sought, experiments are designed, patterns are discovered, and explanations are offered. As I have elsewhere argued, when viewed as social practices it is clear that the natural sciences also follow a hermeneutical process that intertwines explanation with understanding.18 This does not necessarily make science less reliable or less likely to establish veritable truth claims, but it does imply that the rigorous methods that scientists use to discover and describe truth are not categorically different from other human ways of knowing and interpreting the world. Recognizing the hermeneutical character of the sciences has profound implications for how we view the ethics of scientific practice. It presses us to acknowledge that scientists are humans, that they work on behalf of human institutions, and that this human dimension is value laden and negotiable. As such, scientists can and should regularly question whether their practices are moral and their institutions just. Recalling our discussion of Ricoeur’s approach to justice, the hermeneutical humanization of the sciences allows us to ask whether, in general and in particular cases, the relational or the pragmatic dimension of institutional scientific practice has been given priority. We shall see shortly that something similar can be asked of institutional research.

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Interpreting with and for Others Table 11.2  Institutional Research as Hermeneutical Reasoning Terenzini’s Model Tier Contextual Intelligence Issues Intelligence Technical/ Analytical Intelligence

Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics Form

Interpretations = information in context Information = data given meaning Data = fundamental measures

Form

Interpretation

Understanding

Understanding in Context

Explanation

Explanatory Information Objective Measures

Text

Source: Adapted by the author from Ricoeur, various, and Terenzini, “Nature.”

3. INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH AS HERMENEUTICAL REASONING Let us return to the work of institutional research in higher education and see what our detour through Ricoeur has afforded us. In table 11.2 I have placed Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation alongside Terenzini’s model of IR to illustrate the structural parallelism between the two. This an analogical parallelism, so the comparison shouldn’t be taken too deeply (e.g., there are many differences between research data values and elements of a text), but the similarities are sufficient to support my primary claim: Interpretation isn’t just one of many things we do as institutional researchers; it is everything we do. IR is a kind of hermeneutical reasoning because when taken as a whole the three tiers of organizational intelligence work together as one large process of interpretation involving both understanding and explanation. Notice that I have maintained Terenzini’s three tiers and their fundamental forms of evidence. Recall that he built these tiers from the bottom up, so to speak, starting with technical/analytical intelligence and ending with contextual intelligence. He never claims that this is a method, per se, but there is an implicit priority both in the order of presentation and in the way that the lower tiers are portrayed as foundational for the higher tiers. This portrayal would likely appeal to people who are most comfortable with the lowest tier,19 but it is incomplete and potentially misleading. The implicit order of operations could be depicted in this fashion as seen in figure 11.1 Ricoeur’s approach to interpreting texts is similar but with an important difference. He starts with the highest and broadest level of understanding and first works down to explanation before returning back up. As such, his theory of textual interpretation could be depicted as shown in figure 11.2. The final column of table 11.2 suggests a model of institutional research as a kind of interpretation or hermeneutical reasoning, which follows Ricoeur’s

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Figure 11.1 

Order of operations in Terenzini, “Nature.” Author created.

Figure 11.2 

Order of operations in Ricoeur, various. Author created.

theory of interpretation but is also structurally aligned with of Terenzini’s framework for organizational intelligence (figure 11.3). This way of characterizing IR brings to light that the discipline is structured as an interplay between contextual understanding (evident in the tier of contextual intelligence) and explanation (the explication of objective data produced in the tier of technical/analytical intelligence and packaged as information in the tier of issues intelligence). In other words, when considered as a dynamic process Terenzini’s model of organizational intelligence is actually a model of interpretation or hermeneutical reasoning. This hermeneutical depiction of IR reminds us that work in this field is not confined to islands of analytical bliss, but is rather conducted within an

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Figure 11.3  Order of operations: Ricoeur, various, and Terenzini, “Nature,” harmonized by the author. Author created.

institutional context, which Terenzini depicted as the terrain of the last, highest, most complex, and most challenging level of organizational intelligence. Complex as it may be, it is the context of institutional researchers (it is right there in the name), and as such is their first concern, whether they are aware of it or not. Any good statistician will tell you that a poorly designed study tends to produce unreliable data, which is another way of illustrating that research begins long before data is collected. As such, early and repeated attention to context is essential for producing meaningful measures, but even sound data must be interpreted. Terenzini’s model acknowledged that, but our hermeneutical model of IR underscores this even more. Institutional decisions are driven by interpretations, and interpretations are wrapped in a context of understanding from beginning to end. This doesn’t mean we should be kneejerk skeptics, but it does remind us to be careful and humble. Our context influences what we choose to measure, how we measure, how we assign significance, how we display information, how we decide what it all means, and how we choose to act. There is no such thing as letting data “speak for itself” because each explanation has understanding as both its point of origin and its ultimate destination. The hermeneutical point is that a context of understanding begins and ends the interpretive process. We don’t collect data without a perceived need for information. We don’t go searching for information without apparent issues to address. Issues are generated by an institutional context, and an institutional context is defined by its people. A hermeneutical model of IR thereby shifts the focus from data to people; it humanizes the discipline. This in turn has implications for how we perceive the ethical character of the discipline. If IR professionals want to be just contributors to a just university,

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the procedural prioritization of context that is integral to hermeneutics (the formal requirement that interpretation begins and ends with understanding) must become an intention to persistently privilege the relational above the pragmatic dimensions of institutional life. The work of institutional research should be more than mere analysis or even interpretation; it should be interpreting with and for others. The Association of Institutional Research (AIR) recently updated and revised its Code of Ethics and Professional Practices that was first adopted in 1992 and most recently revised in 2014.20 This code covered a long list of recommended principles organized around standards of professional competence, scientific practices, confidentiality, community relations, and professional integrity and responsibility, which in document form ran into eight pages of detailed text. The new “AIR Statement of Ethical Principles”21 has maintained much of the spirit of the original code, but it is greatly streamlined and simplified in comparison such that it can now be printed on a single page. This drastic reduction in length makes one change between versions even more noticeable: the new statement has an additional principle that nowhere appeared in the old code: “We recognize the consequences of our work. The analytic algorithms and applications we build and/or implement, as well as the policy decisions incorporating information we analyze and disseminate, impact people and situations.” I applaud this addition, because it affirms that IR can have real and profound effects on others. Even more surprising is that this item leads the entire list of eleven principles. By including it in their statement of ethics and giving it a place of prominence, the AIR is encouraging practitioners to foreground the human context of their work—the full context of their understanding—in a more profound and personal way. This small change to the ethics statement helps underscore that institutional research is a hermeneutical and ethical discipline, that it is fundamentally about interpretation with and for others. What it determines and how it explains data, both reflects the understanding of the interpreter and ultimately provides the context in which others affected by the decisions form the values that culminate in their preunderstandings of contexts beyond the institution. The rapidly changing and volatile higher education market has all but guaranteed that institutional research is here to stay and will continue to grow as a discipline. This is not welcome news in every quarter. The administrative use of data for decision-making can be seen as impersonal and dehumanizing. Assessment of student learning can appear to be ineffective, burdensome, and even prohibitive to effective teaching. The quantification and/or “corporatization” of higher education can be viewed as a threat to values traditionally championed within the liberal arts, including academic freedom and the Socratic method. Many of our colleagues have these concerns, which aren’t

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all completely unfounded or without merit. It should matter to us a great deal that IR is sometimes perceived in these ways. This work is powerful. Institutional research is simultaneously urgently necessary and profoundly consequential, so it should be practiced with great care, hermeneutical sensitivity, and consideration for others. In this way, it can help guide the justness of the institutions in which students learn to discern what “good” to pursue in their future, with others.

NOTES 1. Jon McGee, Breakpoint: The Changing Marketplace for Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). 2. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 172, cf. 330. 3. Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xii. 4. Ricoeur, The Just, xiii. 5. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 171. He goes on to suggest that this reflexivity is just another form of the hermeneutical “back-and-forth” between (understanding) wholes and (explaining) parts. See 179. 6. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 180. 7. Patrick T. Terenzini, “On the Nature of Institutional Research and the Knowledge and Skills it Requires,” Research in Higher Education 34, no. 1 (1993): 3. 8. Mardy T. Eimers, Jang Wan Ko, and Denise Gardner, “Practicing Institutional Research,” in Richard D. Howard et al., eds., The Handbook of Institutional Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012), 43–50. 9. Terenzini, “Nature,” 4. 10. Terenzini, “Nature,” 5. 11. Terenzini, “Nature,” 6. 12. Kenneth A. Reynhout, Interdisciplinary Interpretation: Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Theology and Science (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013), 67–100. 13. Lawrence K. Schmidt, Understanding Hermeneutics (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2006). 14. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 145–64. See also Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 71–88. 15. Reynhout, Interdisciplinary Interpretation, 68. 16. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 164, 218. See also Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 87. 17. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), x. 18. Reynhout, Interdisciplinary Interpretation, 101–137.

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19. For an insightful analysis of IR professionals that also calls for more emphasis on the highest tier of contextual intelligence, see Eimers, Ko, and Gardner, “Practicing Institutional Research,” 47–50. 20. Association of Institutional Research, “Code of Ethics,” accessed March 2, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.air​​web​.o​​rg​/do​​cs​/de​​fault​​-sour​​ce​/do​​cumen​​ts​-fo​​r​-pag​​es​/20​​14​_​co​​de​ _of​​_ethi​​cs​.pd​​f. 21. Association of Institutional Research, “AIR Statement of Ethical Principles,” accessed March 2, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.air​​web​.o​​rg​/do​​cs​/de​​fault​​-sour​​ce​/do​​cumen​​ts​-fo​​r​ -pag​​es​/et​​hics/​​air​-e​​​thics​​-stat​​ement​​.pdf.​

BIBLIOGRAPHY Association of Institutional Research. “AIR Statement of Ethical Principles.” Accessed March 2, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.air​​web​.o​​rg​/do​​cs​/de​​fault​​-sour​​ce​/do​​cumen​​ts​ -fo​​r​-pag​​es​/et​​hics/​​air​-e​​​thics​​-stat​​ement​​.pdf. ———. “Code of Ethics.” Accessed March 2, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.air​​web​.o​​rg​/do​​cs​/de​​ fault​​-sour​​ce​/do​​cumen​​ts​-fo​​r​-pag​​es​/20​​14​_c​o​​de​_of​​_ethi​​cs​.pd​​f. Eimers, Mardy T., Jang Wan Ko, and Denise Gardner. “Practicing Institutional Research.” In The Handbook of Institutional Research. Edited by Richard D. Howard, Gerald W. McLaughlin, William E. Knight, and Associates, 40–56. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012. Howard, Richard D., Gerald W. McLaughlin, William E. Knight, and Associates, eds. The Handbook of Institutional Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012. McGee, Jon. Breakpoint: The Changing Marketplace for Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Reynhout, Kenneth A. Interdisciplinary Interpretation: Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Theology and Science. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013. Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Edited and Translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. ———. The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. Time and Narrative, vol. 1. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Schmidt, Lawrence K. Understanding Hermeneutics. Durham, UK: Acumen, 2006. Terenzini, Patrick T. “On the Nature of Institutional Research and the Knowledge and Skills it Requires.” Research in Higher Education 34, no. 1 (1993): 1–10.

Chapter 12

Memory, History, and the Forgotten Ricoeur and Access To Higher Education Vero Rose Smith

Paul Ricoeur’s last major work Memory, History, Forgetting investigates the extent to which history depends on memory, and specifically whose memories are considered historical. The summation of decades of work, this treatise begins with a rigorous overview of the phenomenology of memory, and the impossibility of personally remembering the unlived but shared past. Ricoeur expands this impossibility through a review of history as a practice and as an academic discipline. For Ricoeur, written history is a narrative icon that only selectively represents the past. This selectivity of perspective threatens the truth of history—as a representation of a sliver of a whole, the writings of the historian are at best inadequate and at worst a manipulation of the past to serve present purposes. Finally, Ricoeur posits a past that exists outside of the bounds of present perception, much like large objects exist in space beyond our continuous conscious acknowledgment. In this way, we are free of the burden of trying to remember the whole of all of that which we may never be able to perceive, allowing for a Derridian sense of forgiveness through forgetting. Ricoeur’s philosophies map to three central questions in American higher education today: What is college for? Who is college for? Who decides what and who college is for? In the first section of this chapter, a brief overview of the history of higher education in the United States establishes the shifting goals of collegiate study across time, region, class, gender, and race. I argue that institutions of higher education together define the country’s memory of idealism while mimicking a settler colonialist, money-worshipping hierarchy built on oppression. The second portion of this piece examines the motivations and challenges college students face today. Here, I contend that the institutional infrastructures of higher education serve national aggrandized memories more than actual people seeking intellectual fulfillment and 253

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economic betterment. The final segment of this essay explores the fraught professional journey from student to professor and the unlikeliness of success for rural students in particular, and low-income, first-generation, otherwise marginalized, and minoritized students in general. I connect this journey to Ricoeur’s concept of forgetting, and the possibility of forgiveness. In the writing of this work, I employ personal narrative as a Ricoeurian witness testimony and extrapolate my own recollections to a broader experience of learning and teaching. 1. NATIONAL MEMORY OR WHAT IS COLLEGE FOR? Paul Ricoeur writes in Memory and Imagination that “the constant danger of confusing remembering and imagining, resulting from memories becoming images in this way, affects the goal of faithfulness corresponding to the truth claim of memory.”1 Northern Illinois University and Harvard are the only colleges, and Harvard is mythical. I learned about Harvard the way everyone does: from the early aughts overly caffeinated television show Gilmore Girls and the stereotypesmashing movie Legally Blonde. I am ten, and jealous of Rory Gilmore’s posh prep school uniform and respected nerdom. At my rural school, other students call me “Veronica Webster” when I use big words I can’t quite pronounce.2 I get in trouble in class for reading ahead, for reading when the teacher is talking, for doodling on my desk when I am banned from reading. I imagine Harvard as literal ivy-covered buildings with endless books housed in libraries unfathomably vast, and populated by quiet, serious, movie-star-beautiful young people all wearing monogrammed sweaters. Harvard is not a place, it is a nirvanic state of being. Northern Illinois University is more tangible. My father’s preferred radio station, Classical WNIU 90.5, broadcasts from the DeKalb campus a county away and pipes dramatic orchestral swells through the tinny car speakers on drives to and from the grocery store. I think college is where you go to read books, and maybe to play music. A fifth-grade visit to the Art Institute of Chicago explodes my understanding of college. As I ogle at proud suits of armor and splash through Monet’s water lilies, I discover that college is also a place where art can be looked at and created. The distinction between the museum and the school is hazy. I imagine entire days spent wandering gallery after gallery, sketchbook in smudged hand and charcoal pencils stabbed through messy bun. One point of confusion: I am already an artist. How could any school teach me to be what I already am?

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My childhood understanding of the purpose of college more or less conforms to the historical consensus, which is to say, confused idealism. For much of American history, institutions of higher learning did indeed provide places to read and ponder, to explore modes of creative expression and intellectual development. These same institutions also developed from often conflicting goals defined by religious zealots, social strivers, and democratic idealists. Harvard was the first.3 Harvard claims establishment via vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636.4 Seduced by the promised religious freedoms of the New World, twenty-one-year-old minister John Harvard sailed from England in April of 1628 and settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where he died two short years later.5 He gifted half his estate and his entire library to found a school. Harvard’s posthumous generosity was lauded by contemporaries as a sign of divine deliverance. In an early history of Massachusetts, Christian minister Thomas Shepard gives thanks that his God and John Harvard “delivered the country from war with the Indians and Familists, who rose and fell together.”6 Thus, higher education in the proto-United States served settler colonial oppressors. College was to civilize and sedate Native resistance (and not incidentally, also tamp down the obscene, ecstatic worship practices of the Familists, a Dutch mystic Christian sect), or at least to educate leaders to do so—religious freedom in action. How exactly this was accomplished in the classrooms of early colonial colleges is a bit unclear. From the few extant records related to colonial college curriculum, we know admission requirements were published and generally outlined specific ancient authors, classical languages, and understandings of mathematics.7 Because primary and secondary education was not widely accessible, preparation for admissions was likely carried out individually. Private tutoring privileged already well-heeled would-be students. College presidents administered verbal entrance exams. If accepted, young men (for only young men were eligible to apply) memorized and recited biblical verses and ancient Greek philosophy, Latin verb conjugations, and mathematical formulae to their tutors and their peers. Paul Ricoeur, writing some three centuries in the future, criticizes these recitation exercises as “an artificial memory that methodically exploits the resources of the operation of memorization, which we want carefully to distinguish, already on the level of natural memory, from remembering in the limited sense of the evocation of singular facts, events.”8 Compared to true remembering in the Ricoeurian sense, which emphasizes a visceral return to awakened consciousness, memorization is a relational way of learning forms of knowledge in a fixed, pragmatic sense.9 Fittingly, speeches marked the end of collegiate study as well. Public oration during commencement ceremonies signified the culmination of years of

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academic work. However, the exact number of years was generally unspecified. Many pupils passed through early colonial colleges in a year or two. Degrees carried little weight in society at large as less than 1 percent of the colonial population sought formal higher education.10 Most colonial colleges supported fewer than one hundred students in any given academic year. What drew students to these early institutions? And why did colonial leaders wish to support higher education? Puritanism and the emergence of a political philosophy and identity separate from European precedent prompted urgent institutionalization. In addition to being the first institution of higher education in the protoUnited States, Harvard is often considered the first Puritan college. However, this is not to say that the school functioned as a seminary. Rather, Harvard and other early colonial colleges offered courses of study shaped by the writings of dissident English clergy and New England Puritan ministers such as Cotton Mather in addition to ancient philosophical and biblical texts.11 Advanced professional training was also absent from early collegiate curriculum. Trade-specific apprenticeships provided hands-on instruction outside of formal classrooms. To be an apprentice was not the same as to be a student. Apprentices entered training to achieve a singular professional outcome, typically dependent on skilled physical labor. In many cases, apprenticeships were also used as punishment for failure to pay debts or for idleness.12 Colonial colleges, in contrast, were voluntary and offered ethical rather than practical training for the sons of the mercantile elite. To best prepare these pupils for the assumption of leadership roles within their respective family businesses, colleges purported to train and test for moral aptitude. Donor recruitment materials positioned religious curriculum as crucial “to those who do not wish to live for themselves alone, but would apply their talents to the service of the public and the good of mankind.”13 This sentiment was shared across all early institutions. Social mobility was not a crucial function of early institutions of higher education. Rather, such institutions formed to temper the worst impulses of the elite and to entrench a burgeoning class hierarchy.14 Divorced from the monarchies and aristocracies of Europe, colleges established during the colonial era formed and solidified new social orders. Ricoeur might contend that new social orders must form and solidify as discourses, and what better stage for discourse than a classroom?15 After the Revolution, colleges served roughly the same purpose and espoused a similar curriculum, but crucially expanded in mission to define a new national identity. As a kind of collective consensus, national identity might best be approached from a foundation of what Ricoeur would term collective memory and in the case of former colonies, collective forgetting.16 George Washington dreamed of establishing a national college to rival the grand and historied institutions of study in Europe and even deeded land to

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the burgeoning government for this purpose.17 In keeping with the idealistic anti-centralization of the new nation, a national center of learning never fully formed. Instead, individual states competed to establish schools. Institutions created by state governments were complemented by private institutions, often founded to espouse the teachings of particular religious sects. Despite these lofty moral aims, the period immediately following the Revolution was a time of great academic unrest. By the early 1800s, colleges turned violent, as evidenced by documents such as the worried journals of Harvard Professor Eliphalet Pearson.18 This collegiate tumult reflected broader cultural contention between fledgling states, national oversight, and foreign powers. Though orations in Greek and Latin had successfully produced the founding fathers of the nation, this curriculum seemed increasingly irrelevant to the task of transforming and colonizing a continent. Settler colonialism necessitates collective effort. The first glimmers of more democratic enrollment practices appeared during this period. To rise to the challenge of taming the supposed wilds of the expanding country, reformers in the 1820s freed curricular offerings from rote memorization of classic literature to encompass more modern theories of science and mathematics.19 Thus, the purpose of college shifted from moral instruction for future financial elites to a more egalitarian training center for expanders of the burgeoning American empire. Not yet all, but certainly more, were welcome. Young white men from a broader range of class backgrounds made their way into collegiate classrooms. Though few records of student life from this era exist, several memoirs extolling student life at Williams, Princeton, and Yale circulated in the mid-nineteenth century. These writings mention roiling conflicts on campus as everything ranging from rowdy boyish fun to full-blown riots. Most of the memoirs wax nostalgic, and focus on the social aspects—what Ricoeur might identify as imagination more than memory—of collegiate life.20 Outside of rarified early colleges, the 1800s witnessed a substantial increase of white women and African American students. Institutions were founded to cater specifically to members of these new college-going constituencies. Philo A. Hutchinson describes the types of institutions available to white women as typically either female seminaries, teacher training schools, coeducational midwestern colleges or colleges specifically founded to serve only white women. Similarly, the vast majority of African American students of this time attended specialized institutions explicitly established to serve this population. Rampant racism and sexism, codified into law, necessitated these segregated spaces of learning. However, by the 1830s, some institutions welcomed students from a broad range of backgrounds. Notably, Oberlin College admitted white men and women from its inception in 1833 and began admitting African American men and women two short years later. This is

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not to say that even integrated institutions were equitable: white women, African American women, and African American men were all constrained in their ability to fully participate in academic life. Limits on public speech provide one example of these constraints. Like colonial-era collegiate education, many institutions required students to demonstrate their intellectual accomplishments through public oration. However, women were not permitted to give public speeches at Oberlin. African American women were both barred from public speaking and pressed into domestic service roles as a requirement of their enrollment. Similarly, African American men were conscripted to physical labor around campus and courses of study that resulted in immediate, practical careers.21 What motivated college attendance in this era? Hutcheson argues that educational attainment was fueled by desires segmented along race and gender lines. Wealthier white women attended college to develop the capacity to run stately households and converse prettily and intelligently with their well-educated husbands. In the slaveholding South, this curriculum often included instruction on how to interact with and manage enslaved people. White women from more humble beginnings sought collegiate education to gain entry into the limited career fields available to women, but most left the workforce after marriage. Free African American women, who typically maintained work outside of the home even after marriage, attended colleges of this era to receive training for both the public and private spheres. Beyond personal professional goals, the founders of early schools for African Americans sought to establish racial equality. The mere existence of such institutions of higher learning provided a counternarrative to the pernicious, racist belief that African Americans were intellectually inferior—a belief enshrined in law both before the Civil War and during the following Jim Crow era.22 Twentieth-century progressivism was perhaps a natural extension of the burgeoning perception of higher education as social equalizer. Hutcheson defines progressivism as “the predominately middle-class impulse represents the need for political, social, economic, and even moral reform through administrative often governmental structures.”23 As governmental bureaucracies expanded to grapple with the growing challenges of industrialization and resultant waves of immigration, higher education in some ways returned to colonial roots. College and university training taught moral fitness for social and political administration. In an 1897 address aptly titled “Why Go to College?” former Wellesley College president Alice Freeman Palmer argues eloquently: The good society of scholars and of libraries and laboratories has no place and no attraction for her who finds no message in Plato, no beauty in mathematical order, and who never longs to know the meaning of the stars over her head or

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the flowers under her feet. Neither will the finer opportunities of college life appeal to one who, until she is eighteen (is there such a girl in this country?), has felt no passion for the service of others, no desire to know if through history, or philosophy, or any study of the laws of society she can learn why the world is so sad, so hard, so selfish as she finds it.24

Palmer also contends that happiness is a worthy goal in collegiate study. Conforming to progressive ideals, Palmer defines happiness as “health and friends and work and objects of aspiration,” all of which are to be found at college. Notably, Palmer conflates work, health, and happiness—all depend on each other.25 Testimonies gathered by Clayton Sedgwick Cooper in his 1912 tome Why Go to College echo these sentiments: A Johns Hopkins man attributes to his university “a desire for, search after, and acceptance of the truth regardless of the consequences.” A recent alumnus of Boston University says: “I learned to have a far broader view of what teaching (my profession) really is. When I entered college I regarded it as a process of instilling a knowledge of facts in a young person’s mind; when I graduated I know that this was a very small part, merely a means to the great end—the development of personality.” A graduate of the University of Georgia says that his college course meant to him “a self-unfoldment, a diversity of interest in life, a growth of ideals, of purposes, and of judgement; strong convictions and friendships.” A student from the School of Mines in Colorado considers the chief value of his college training was [sic] the giving him “a vision of a lifework instead of a job”; a graduate of the University of Louisiana writes that the chief value to him was “a realization that I was worth as much as the average man”; while an alumnus of Vanderbilt University said that his course gave him the “feeling of equality and of opportunity to do things and be something along with other men. It has meant, perhaps, a greater chance to do my best.”26

The author concludes with a personal reflection, noting that the “true modern university contributes to the world a great-minded and a great-hearted man, to whom college life has been a soul’s birth as well as a mind’s awakening.”27 Simultaneously, professionalization and formalization of fields of study such as medicine, architecture, and the practice of law was a crucial component of higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The global conflict of World War I galvanized further expansion of higher education. Veterans were angered by the refusal of the federal government to pay out promised stipends. Through collective action, veterans pressured the Roosevelt administration into laying the groundwork for the G. I. Bill, a seminal piece of legislation that centered access to higher education as a

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crucial component of achieving the American Dream. Though many historians argue that the G. I. Bill disproportionately rewarded veterans from class backgrounds already predisposed to collegiate education, this federal initiative also enabled access for some soldiers who might not have been able to attend college otherwise. Importantly, the G. I. Bill positioned higher learning as both a reward for service and a marker of class stability.28 In 1940, the first year the U.S. census collected data about educational attainment, about 5.9 percent of American adults over the age of twenty-five had earned bachelor’s degrees.29 This percentage increased throughout the following decades. By mid-century, many government officials, college administrators, and professors worried about the impending swell of college enrollment as the baby-boomer generation matured and prepared for adult life. In an article for the May 1955 edition of The Educational Forum, Francis F. Horn predicted that college enrollment in the late 1960s and early 1970s would account for nearly 70 percent of all young adults, a drastic increase from the 31 percent of degree-seekers the author estimated at time of writing.30 However, U.S. Census data potentially contradicts Horn’s assertion of enrollment percentages. As of the year 1955, only some 7 percent of American adults held a college degree. This proportion increased marginally to a little over 10 percent by the end of the 1960s.31 What was the function of higher education at this time? Horn quotes a recent federal commission report on the state of higher education and asserts definitively that “higher education must be concerned with other than intellectual excellence. It sees an educated and informed citizenry as the foundation of our democratic society.”32 Adding to these lofty democratic ideals, Horn cites the country’s increased demand for skilled, technological labor: “Our need is for more young men and women to keep our technological society running in high gear. The current fear of automation is groundless.”33 Finally, though Horn supports the existence of multiple tracks for higher education including a range from professional licensure to two-year junior colleges to four-year liberal arts degrees, he resolutely rejects governmental control over who attends each type of institution, citing failures of opportunity and class-based fissures in European educational systems that employ such a division. Instead, Horn again waxes patriotically poetic, and declares: “In diversity lies the strength of American higher education; we must preserve it.” Horn implies that individual choice is a crucial aspect of maintaining diversity and that diversity is a uniquely American strength. Horn’s predictions of a college attendance boom did not come to pass. By 1970, 11 percent of American adults had completed a four-year degree or more—still an increase, but not the deluge some college administrators and government officials feared.34 The civil unrest of the previous decade manifested as other fears. Senior research psychologist for the College Entrance

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Examination Board Warren W. Willingham describes the troubled state of higher education: From 1947 to 1967, the proportion of college-age young people actually enrolled in higher education institutions approximately doubled. In the same interval, the number of degrees conferred by colleges each year also increased twofold. Despite this progress—and partly because of it—social and economic opportunity has become increasingly associated with access to higher education.35

After describing the unanticipated expansion jobs in the service sector requiring postsecondary training, Willingham notes a need for “the recognition of deep-seated social injustice which have greatly intensified interest in expanding and equalizing opportunity for education beyond high school.”36 Willingham asserts that above all else, college should be responsive to the needs of individuals and the needs of broader society, providing training for a range of professions while also centering individual learners. Speaking to the urgency for personal relevance, Willingham writes: If there is to be equal opportunity of expression, personally relevant to all young people, it must be supported by readily available resources which meet the needs of individuals. Personal relevance implies not only an absence of barriers to individual achievement and fulfillment, but also programs which ensure minimum inequities due to social conditions perhaps only partly related to individual aspiration and typically beyond individual intervention.37

Willingham identifies financial restraints, academic standards, accessibility of facilities, and social differences in access as the main barriers to higher education. These barriers still exist and are arguably exacerbated by increasing disparities nationally. As of 2019, nearly 39 percent of American adults have completed a four-year degree or more.38 However, though more people are attaining these degree designations than ever before, the college experience is still far from equal. Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs argue in their 2014 book How College Works that students seek higher education to energize and motivate them for learning, for excelling at athletics, for socializing (yes—for partying, drinking, hooking up), for giving tremendous loyalty to the institution, for pursuing careers, and sometimes even for becoming, as the cliché has it, “lifelong learners.”39

These sentiments echo the motivations of students at the turn of the twentieth century. However, these aspirations are decidedly middle to upper class.

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The authors begin their survey of the college experience (reflective only of their own students at a selective, expensive four-year liberal arts college) with the first encounter of a campus as successfully enrolled freshmen. The third chapter of this work, titled “Choosing,” only describes choices made once enrolled—course registration, extracurricular activities, faculty advisor—not all of the decisions and choices leading to college enrollment in the first place. I contend low-income, first-generation, rural college students today are motivated primarily by economic desperation, and secondarily by the more cerebral and social promises of higher education. Are such nakedly financially driven students welcome on today’s campuses? Ricoeur might rephrase the question “Why go to college?” with another question: “For whom does college allow one to remember oneself?”40 2. HISTORY: WHO IS COLLEGE FOR? “Like dirt.” She scrunched her nose in disgust. Her friend nodded in agreement and added “And trash! Dirt and trash.” I tried—failed—to conceal my shock. I’m used to working with adult college students who are typically (but not always) less blunt. With a few choice words, these two twelve-year-olds managed to shake my hard-earned sense of professional self. I felt defensive. In my best teacher voice, I managed “But can you think of a positive way to describe rural places?” The first student thought, pronounced “Animals. Sometimes there are animals.” I am a rural animal. I am a rural trash-animal trapped in a hotel conference room with twentyseven tweens bussed in from across Eastern Iowa. In my haughty capacity as an academic art museum curator and adjunct assistant professor, I did not expect to emotionally return to my vulnerable childhood memories while volunteering with middle schoolers for the day. I am astonished at the astute recitation of rural stereotypes, stated matter-of-factly by people so young and people themselves raised in a place often conflated with the rural. We are gathered in commemoration of the twenty-third Annual International Day, sponsored by the Stanley Foundation, University of Iowa International Programs, University of Iowa Center for Human Rights, and the University of Iowa College of Education. We are contemplating Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing

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and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.41 Our exploration of Article 25 is guided by my prior research into the history, resource disparity, and depiction of rural places in the United States. Reflecting on this experience months later, and the surfacing of painful inaccurate stereotypes, I wonder: Is a college education now required to access food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services? Is access to college beyond the control of more people than not? Who gets left out? According to a 2016 study by Timothy J. Bartik and Brad Hershbein, the career earnings premium from a bachelor’s degree is 136 percent for students hailing from families above the poverty line compared to their non-collegegoing middle- to upper-income peers. However, this increase in earnings diminishes substantially for college graduates from low-income families. These students only make 71 percent more than their noncollege going lowincome peers.42 More money is usually a good thing, but this study does not account for other financial factors such as student debt accrual. As of 2015, only 29 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds from rural areas enrolled in a postsecondary education program, whereas nearly 48 percent of urban young people enrolled. While only 19 percent of rural adults hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, 33 percent of their urban peers enjoy this degree designation.43 Rural trash-animals don’t go to college. I am a tween toeing the crumbling asphalt seam between backroad and gravel driveway. The sun exhales silver over bleached corn stalks with special care, freezing toward pink. Illinois is the second-flattest state. The low, long horizon is as steady as November mornings are fragile. I am thinking about the shapes my breath makes on the tinted window of the bus, how my fingers scratch to reshape the tinted window frost, about holding breath around the curve of the road that hurtles the bus past the witch’s grave. I wait. To be a child in a rural place living in a house in the woods two and a half miles outside of town is to wait, and to be alone often. This is a gift. The bus gives this gift. After school and alone, I scoop raw powdered Ovaltine malt with a spoon straight from the container into my mouth. I play guitar bad and loud. I play French horn bad and loud. I scream-sing into a tape recorder until it vibrates my voice back to me. I listen to the cyborg screech of the dial-up internet connecting. I internet-research palmistry, ancestry, and the meanings

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of dreams—ways of connecting. In chat rooms, I am 14/f/outer space even though I am 11/f/rural Illinois because there is danger in exact locations on the internet. I type “socks” when digital boys ask me what I am wearing. I am the first sixth grader to have a cell phone because when the power fails, the landline does not work. There is danger in aloneness. When the power fails, the well water is unreachable. The moment the neon green numbers on the oven blink out, the plug must be placed in the sunken tub and the tap opened to capture as much pipe-trapped water as possible. Many years before, my grandparents visited. Maybe in celebration, I marked my three-year-old legs with blue, purple, red, and black squiggle-stripes. The summer heat overwhelmed the electrical grid, and my marked legs could not be cleaned. When the power fails, our house is low priority because it is two and a half miles outside of town. Exact locations are important in the physical world. Being located is important. Sometimes, words are locations. I am sixteen and locating words in standardized tests in the high school cafeteria, Ticonderoga no. 2 pencil eraser tapping gapped front teeth. I know this particular test, the ACT, will make or break my chances of college acceptance. The ACT is only administered once a year at my school and costs money. The SAT is not proctored anywhere in my county. I can’t fuck this up. There will be no second chance. I worry that I am not well enough prepared. Private tutors don’t exist in my district—in fact, I am the closest thing to a private tutor. I give free music lessons to all grade levels and all instruments during open periods and after school. Perhaps studious suburban students hole up in the library for weeks to study. My school library is closed, as it has been for almost two years because the district has no money to hire someone to replace the recently retired librarian. Students elsewhere pad their high school schedules with Advanced Placement classes, a potential counterbalance to middling test scores in the college admissions race and a way to earn college credits before arriving on campus. My school does not offer any Advanced Placement classes.44 Rather, my district touts a secondary suite of more challenging “advanced” courses that I happily take, but that do not earn me college-equivalent credits. My only real preparation for the test is participating in WYSE—the Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering Academic Challenge, a test-taking competition run by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That and re-reading straight through a dogeared copy of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. My school’s WYSE team is championed by a beloved physics teacher who gifted me a book called Physics for Poets as I struggled through the mathier parts of his class.45 I am allowed to participate on the team even though I miss most practices because of my after-school job at the small local business that

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employs my entire family. I compete in English and biology, which sort of prepares me for three of the four sections of the ACT. Preparedness matters because leaving matters because returning matters the most. My dream is to become a high school biology teacher and return to my home district so that I can secretly sneak arts training and appreciation into the curriculum. In my time as a student, several referendums proposing the elimination of arts education have come before my community. A neighboring town has already eliminated their arts offerings. When I imagine my high school without band and choir, I imagine dropping out. I think I can change the culture of my hometown for the better, to a place that sees the value of the arts, and I know a college education is a crucial step in this plan (though I don’t understand teacher licensure). When I seek guidance on the college admissions process, my high school counselor discourages me from pursuing Ivy League schools, from considering private institutions, from applying out of state at all. I am dissuaded from entering a four-year institution immediately out of high school. Scholarships are mysterious and difficult to research let alone apply for without consistent access to the internet. Like many high school students graduating into the Great Recession, I am advised to view student loan debt as a necessary and noble investment in myself and my future. Like me, many rural, low-income, first-generation college hopefuls today still lack appropriate academic preparation and access to support in the college application process. Sonja Ardoin attests that rural, low-income, first-generation college hopefuls obtain most of their information about the college application process anecdotally. Many such students are hindered by family and community cultures that lack understanding of college. Material constraints—no vehicle to travel to potential schools for visits, no money for multiple applications—also foil rural high school student aspirations.46 I am eighteen, and my standardized test scores are high enough to earn me partial academic scholarships to several four-year colleges in my state. The School of the Art Institute is not one of these institutions: after I learned that the school only offered “sound” classes and not music classes, I decided against applying. My family income is low enough to render me eligible for federal Pell grants and a similar state-level grant program.47 My lack of money, demanding work and rehearsal schedules, and shared vehicle make college visits in state difficult and college visits out of state impossible. I muddle through institution-specific merit-based scholarship applications, borrowing friends’ slightly faster, more internet-capable computers and working from the dinky public library. I prepare audition pieces and my portfolio of visual art over long evenings after work. I only managed to travel to one of the institutions that accepted me to participate in merit scholarship auditions

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and reviews. This school awards me four renewable scholarships covering roughly half of tuition. I enroll. I am twenty-two. Despite juggling a kaleidoscope of grants, merit scholarships, and part-time odd jobs through three years of college, I am living on a porch and stealing apples to survive. It is my senior year of college. My peers are already celebrating their accomplishments in college and their future careers. I feel lost, unable to celebrate. I decided against pursuing an education degree as that course of training would add an additional year onto my college experience. My professional future is uncertain. Each year, tuition increased, but my merit-based aid did not. Tearful, humiliating meetings with the dean of students proved futile. Now, I struggle to eat and to clean my clothes. Because I cannot afford coin-operated laundry machines or the time to walk to the laundromat nearly a mile away, I hand-wash my clothes in the kitchen sink, drip-dry the garments on twine strung across my makeshift porch bedroom, and pray no one can smell my struggle. I am an honors student pursuing a triple major, and I am highly involved in social and environmental justice causes, but I shiver in a fraying corduroy jacket until a mentor gifts me a worn but sturdy wool coat. I will forever be grateful for the people at my undergraduate institution who see my need and help, and for the Pell grants and Illinois MAP grants that made college graduation (cum laude, no less) possible. Because of these people and these opportunities, I am the first in my family to earn a bachelor’s degree. I have since experienced food and housing insecurity thrice, the most recent brush with homelessness occurring during graduate study at Harvard. I didn’t know I was poor and rural until I was almost through college. This is in part because my family was comfortable relative to the rest of my community of origin throughout much of my childhood. My parents own their house, and the several acres of woods around their house. Because my father is a musician and my mother is an avid reader, music and books and art were a constant presence. However, neither of my parents hold a college degree. Both parents experienced bouts of unemployment, sometimes simultaneously, throughout my childhood and early adulthood. The Great Recession decimated their livelihoods as it did for so many. Sociologist Anthony Jack labels students sharing my background as “Doubly Disadvantaged.” Students lacking financial resources and familiarity with college culture meet Jack’s definition.48 However, my race and some of my precollege experiences allowed me to pass as higher income in certain interactions. Experiences I sought out as a teenager also afforded class camouflage. In high school, I had the wonderful opportunity to tour with my district’s competitive marching band, jazz ensemble, and jazz choir. I was also fortunate to travel to Europe over the spring break of my senior year of high school, where I visited both Paris and London—my parents’ graduation gift.

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These formative experiences were enough to allow stealth infiltration into conversations with peers from higher socioeconomic strata. As a white person, I am privileged to be mistakenly perceived as of a different class and geographic origin than how I identify. Of course, this conflation of racial identity, geographic origin, and social class is racist. As of 2013, two-thirds of those skirting the poverty line identified as white.49 Legal scholar Lisa R. Pruitt argues that we “effectively use our racism problem to conceal a different but related problem: low-SES people of all colors face mounting structural obstacles to overall well-being and to upward mobility, including access to a good education, from pre-K through professional and graduate school.”50 Passing creates potential for outing—as my encounter with filter-less middle schoolers demonstrates, stigma facing people from low-socioeconomic-status and low cultural capital backgrounds persists and is exacerbated by socioeconomic homogeneity in all professions, especially in academia. How can the culture of academia shift to abolish the need for “passing” in any sense? How can a more just university come into being? 3. FORGETTING: WHO DECIDES WHAT AND WHO COLLEGE IS FOR? Intersectional diversification of the professoriate and administrative structures of universities is critical in creating a more just, accessible institution. Colleges and universities must actively seek to permanently hire and promote candidates from historically underrepresented backgrounds, including rural identities. Because of systemic injustices and persistent racism, the class and geographic background of racial minority-identified administrators and professors is often assumed to be low-income and urban. However, research suggests that a majority of successful academics who identify as racial minorities come from higher-income brackets.51 In a professional setting presumed to be elite, being outed as someone from a nonelite background is dangerous, particularly given the precarity of many collegiate teaching roles. Sociologist Elizabeth M. Lee argues that the statistically few members of faculties from lower-class strata grapple with anxiety and frustration because of their backgrounds. Nearly a third (31 percent) of undergraduate students in the United States received Pell grants to offset the costs of the 2018–2019 academic year.52 Of undergraduate Pell grant recipients, only 49 percent actually complete a four-year degree. To become a college-level instructor, graduate study is required. Of the 49 percent of Pell grant recipients that manage to matriculate, only a small percentage are able to continue on to graduate study. The exact percentage of low-income students pursuing graduate study is hard to determine as graduate students are not eligible for Pell grants. However,

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the Council of Graduate Schools has recently begun to track the rate of firstyear graduate students who were also Pell recipients. Across all graduate and professional fields of study, 45.8 percent of first-year graduate students in academic year 2015–2016 utilized Pell grants to partially fund their undergraduate degrees.53 Ruralism is not accounted for in these statistics, but given the percentage of rural college graduates, we can assume that low-income students from rural areas are a minority of students overall. As the percentage of Pell grant recipients has risen, so too has institutional reliance on nontenure-track part-time faculty positions, which often pay minimum wage or less and are bereft of benefits.54 Almost 75 percent of teaching positions are now filled by contingent instructors, and underrepresented minorities are overrepresented in these ranks.55 Pell grant recipients are also likely to owe more in student loans, which can make working low-wage, temporary work untenable. In light of the current pandemic situation, this work may disappear entirely as institutions of higher education slash budgets to counterbalance the loss of tuition and room and board income in coming semesters.56 Simultaneously, many current low-income students in general and rural low-income students in particular will be forced to drop out of degree programs due to suddenly diminished funds and lack of access to the internet.57 Yet, when such aspiring professors manage to secure steady work, Lee demonstrates that many faculty members view their class backgrounds as the source of their political views, teaching approaches, research framework, and choice of subjects. In turn, this orientation to scholarship and pedagogy shapes academia over time and has the potential to render institutions more or less welcoming to future scholars focused on expanding the range of voices and perspectives represented.58 Ricoeur argues that “consciousness and memory are one and the same thing, irrespective of any substantial basis . . . in the matter of personal identity, sameness equals memory.”59 What happens when one’s personal identity is not reflected by institutions, when one’s sense of sameness is violated and replaced by a sense of deep divide? The vast majority of the professoriate hails from the same class and cultural strata as the vast majority of college students. Furthermore, because professors tend to write the books that other professors teach, the majority of survey texts chronicle the concerns and perspectives of the well-heeled. This is particularly true within the history, theory, and practice of visual arts, but it doesn’t have to be so. My own career trajectory echoes Lee’s findings. As a rural, low-income, first-generation college graduate, I now prioritize outreach to rural communities and populations beyond the traditional scope of institutions of higher education. In teaching arts foundation courses at Kirkwood Community College—one of the most ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse institutions in the state of Iowa—I saw myself in many of my

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students. Many of my students are rural, low-income, and first-generation and thus have to work through school. I also had the honor and privilege of working with students holding radically different intersecting identities than my own. Many of my students are visible minorities and are new to the United States, new to the English language, and refugees new to living outside of an active war zone. When I began teaching at Kirkwood Community College, the syllabus for the introductory art history survey classes I inherited focused almost entirely on ruling-class European arts. This makes perfect sense—who but the wealthy and powerful can commission art? Who but the wealthy and powerful can collect art commissioned by the wealthy and powerful? And unfortunately for my students, who but the relatively wealthy could actually afford the textbook, which costs nearly $300 new, and close to that used? I was unable to change the assigned textbook my first semester teaching as contingent faculty. To lessen the financial burden on students, I asked the library to purchase a copy to keep on reserve. I was told that I would have to purchase with my own money a copy of the text to donate to the school library, so I instead found a digital bootleg version of the book to share with students that needed it. I augmented the textbook readings with short, accessibly written articles, videos, and playlists of music. Even more crucially, I asked students about who and what was missing from each week’s readings. Students noticed. Students noticed themselves missing. At best, art can serve as a physical mnemonic device—primary source documentation of advances in medicine, physics, ecology, and all other genres of inquiry. Art history also has a distinct advantage in an era completely dominated by image-centric communication. We (our students more so) are fluent in Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Snapchat, and selfies. Images are a shared language, instantly able to communicate cross-culturally and crossgeographically. Art history is capable not only of harnessing the fleeting attentions of this visually proficient generation of students but also of imparting a deep sense of chronology, collective memory, and shared experience. However, this is only possible if students feel agency within the art history classroom and feel themselves crucial contributors to the creation of future histories outside of the classroom. So I took my students outside of the classroom. I learned from a quick show of hands that only about half of my students had visited a museum of any kind, ever. I hoped to facilitate for my students the same awe-inspiring experiences I had as a child at the Art Institute of Chicago. Based on surveys administered in the first week of class that gauged student interest in topics to be covered, I leaned on my network of cultural industry peers to create a nearly semester-long series of field trips all within our community. This network was cultivated through my full-time job as an academic art museum

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curator, which I worked in addition to teaching—the ability to juggle multiple professional roles, it should be pointed out, is the direct result of my lowincome status as a college student. Because my students already commuted to our campus, I gambled that the inconvenience of traveling another mile was worth the incredible connections I hoped to foster. To ensure all students could participate in field trips, I arranged carpools, figured out bus and bike routes, and offered to assist any student with the cost of extra transportation if needed. Through these field trips, my students met practicing artists in their studios, accomplished museum professionals, city officials, festival founders, architects, and arts facility managers. Together, we witnessed the production and economic end of art-making in our community. Together, we witnessed the profound anti-neutrality of museums—shared experiences that helped us better relate to historic modes of arts production.60 Back in classroom, my students engaged in daily design-oriented, creative exercises such as representing an abstract concept like love or freedom in nine lines or less, or by creating a daily schedule for a hypothetical commune of their own construction. The semester culminated in substantial responsive projects completely driven by student interests. These projects manifested as more traditional art historical essays, sushi rolls, makeup tutorials, and once, a Bauhaus-inspired band poster. Through the combination of reading and discussing historic arts practices, creating new works in a low-stakes, playful environment, meeting practicing arts professionals, and deeply researching a topic of their own choice, my students gained a fuller picture of the history, theory, and practice of art that honored their own perspectives and experiences. I now define my success as an educator by the number of students I run into at art events well after the semester has ended. 4. THE FORGOTTEN bell hooks writes of poor students and higher learning in a way that complements a reading of Ricoeur’s Memory, History Forgetting.61 Ricoeur states, “It is only by analogy, and in relation to individual consciousness and its memory, that collective memory is held to be a collection of traces left by the events that have affected the course of history of the groups concerned, and that it is accorded the power to place on stage these common memories, on the occasion of holidays, rites, and public celebrations.”62 If institutions of higher learning continue to insist on forgetting the existence of poor, striving students equally intellectually capable as their wealthy peers, the noble premise of continued education as social equalizer is lost. Who are we when we do not see ourselves? Who are we when we, and our institutional accolades, are built on amnesia? Instead, higher education should

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forget its unequal founding as a means of forgiveness, and work toward equity. College should be for all who hope to hold sacred some small part of our collective memory.

NOTES 1. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 7. 2. “Webster” here refers to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, which was my second-favorite dictionary as a child. Though a comparatively mild taunt, this insult cut deep. 3. Surviving colleges founded before 1781 include Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Rutgers, William and Mary, and Yale—all still prestigious institutions—yet none contest the “first” status of Harvard quite as vehemently as William and Mary (now Williams College). This institution cites plans for the college dating to 1618, “decades before Harvard,” but was only officially chartered in 1693. John Thelin, American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 1. 4. “History,” Harvard University, accessed February 23, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.har​​ vard.​​edu​/a​​bout-​​harva​​rd​/ha​​rvard​​-glan​​​ce​/hi​​story​. 5. Henry C. Shelley, John Harvard and His Times (Boston: Little, Brown, 1907), 249–252. 6. Thomas Shepard, New England’s First Fruits (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1853), cxxvi. 7. Thelin, American Higher Education, 15–18. 8. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 57. 9. Verbal examination was also pragmatic as the materials of education dear to us today—paper, pens—were dearer still in the colonial era and were near-luxury items. For more on the economic interplay between paper, pupils, and the polity, see Roger Mellen, “The Press, Paper Shortages, and Revolution in Early America,” Media History, 21, no. 1 (December 2014): 23–41. 10. In 1768, so few students petitioned to graduate from William and Mary that the newly appointed governor of Virginia decided to incentivize graduation by offering cash prizes and symbolic medallions during the next commencement week oratory contests. Though enrollment rallied via similar incentives throughout the colonies, few still attended college at all. Thelin, American Higher Education, 20. 11. Though some early institutions such as William and Mary initially hoped to offer seminary courses, logistical constraints hampered planning. William and Mary could not carry out the ordination of an Anglican priest despite royal charter. Only bishops had the power to do so. Aspiring religious leaders in the colonies had to travel to England to seek seminary training. Thelin, American Higher Education, 20–26. 12. For a comparative overview of professional training, see Kathleen Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2004).

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13. John Witherspoon, “Address to the Inhabitant of Jamaica and Other WestIndia Islands on Behalf of the College of New Jersey, 1775,” in The Works of John Witherspoon, D.D., vol. 8 (Edinburgh: Printed for J. Ogle, Parliament-Square, 1815), 309. 14. Philo A. Hutchinson, A People’s History of American Higher Education (New York: Routledge, 2020), 53. 15. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 143. 16. Here, revolutionary politicos attempted to forget the oppression of their colonial rulers. To forget is not to create an absence, but rather to form new shapes from old, incomplete material. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 95–105. 17. Hutchinson, People’s History, 58. 18. As described by Leon Jackson, “The Rights of Man and the Rites of Youth: Fraternity and Riot at Eighteenth-Century Harvard,” in The American College in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger L. Geiger (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 46–48. 19. Four reformers that made a significant mark on collegiate curriculum were Philip Lindsley of the University of Nashville, George Ticknor of Harvard, James Marsh of the University of Vermont, and Jacob Abbot at Amherst. All had themselves graduated from traditional colleges (Bowdoin, Dartmouth, and Princeton, respectively). Of the four, three were clergymen. All valued humanist pedagogy and all sought to expand the college experience beyond the mercantile elite. Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 113–120. 20. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 7. 21. Hutchinson, People’s History, 99–103. 22. Hutchinson, People’s History, 105–108. 23. Hutchinson, People’s History, 132–133. 24. Alice Freeman Palmer, Why Go to College? (New York: Crowell, 1897), 3–5. 25. Palmer, Why Go to College?, 8. 26. Clayton Sedgwick Cooper, Why Go to College? (New York: Century, 1912), 139. 27. Cooper, Why Go to College?, 199–200. 28. Hutchinson, People’s History, 127–135. 29. U.S. Census Bureau, Education and Social Stratification Branch, “Table A-2. Percent of People 25 Years and Over Who Have Completed High School or College, by Race, Hispanic Origin and Sex: Selected Years 1940 to 2019,” Microsoft Excel sheet, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w2​.ce​​nsus.​​gov​/p​​rogra​​ms​-su​​rveys​​/demo​​/tabl​​es​/ed​​ucati​​onal-​​ attai​​nment​​/time​​-seri​​es​/cp​​s​-his​​toric​​al​-t​i​​me​-se​​ries/​​taba-​​2​.xls​​x. 30. Francis F. Horn, “Who Should Go to College?,” The Educational Forum, May 1955, 399. 31. Of course, Horn includes two-year technical and trade schools as well as other professional certificate programs and bible colleges in his enrollment estimation while the census only records self-reported matriculation from four-year institutions. Furthermore, Horn speaks to rates of enrollment only rather than degree conferment. Regardless of specific statistics, student enrollment had indeed increased. Horn, “Who Should Go to College?” 402.

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32. Horn, “Who Should Go to College?” 402. 33. Horn, “Who Should Go to College?” 404. 34. U.S. Census Bureau, 2020. 35. Terrel H. Bell, Elliot L. Richardson, and Peter P. Muirhead, eds., “Trends in Postsecondary Education,” U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, October 1970, 69. 36. Bell, Richardson, and Muirhead, “Trends in Postsecondary Education,” 69. 37. Bell, Richardson, and Muirhead, “Trends in Postsecondary Education,” 71. 38. U.S. Census Bureau, 2020. 39. Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs, How College Works (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 17. 40. Ricoeur’s description of self-knowledge provides a generous overview of the multiplicity of purposes higher education has and might serve: “One does not simply remember oneself, seeing, experiencing, learning; rather one re­calls the situations in the world in which one has seen, experienced, learned. These situations imply one's own body and the bodies of others, lived space, and, finally, the horizon of the world and worlds, within which something has occurred.” Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 36. 41. United Nations General Assembly, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” December 10, 1948, Article 25. 42. Timothy J. Bartik and Brad Hershbein, Degrees of Poverty: Family Income Background and the College Earnings Premium, Upjohn Institute mimeo (Kalamazoo, MI: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2016). 43. Postsecondary National Policy Institute. “Rural Students in Higher Education.” FactSheets. Published March 21, 2020. https​:/​/pn​​pi​.or​​g​/rur​​al​-st​​udent​​s​-in-​​highe​​r​​-edu​​ catio​​n/. 44. The College Board accredits and oversees Advanced Placement classes. “Discover AP,” College Board, accessed April 1, 2020, https://ap​.collegeboard​.org. 45. See Robert H. March, Physics for Poets (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996). 46. Sonja Ardoin, College Aspirations and Access in Working-Class Rural Communities: The Mixed Signals, Challenges, and New Language First-Generation Students Encounter (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2018), 11–14. 47. The Illinois Monetary Award Program, which is subject to the whims of state financing and is only available to low-income students. See Illinois Student Association Commission, “Monetary Award Program (MAP),” accessed March 30, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.isa​​c​.org​​/stud​​ents/​​durin​​g​-col​​lege/​​types​​-of​-f​​i nanc​​ial​-a​​id​/gr​​ants/​​ monet​​​ary​-a​​ward-​​progr​​am/. 48. Anthony Jack, The Privileged Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 11. 49. Mark R. Rank, “Poverty in America is Mainstream,” New York Times, November 3, 2013. 50. Lisa R. Pruitt, “Who’s Afraid of White Class Migrants? On Denial, Discrediting and Disdain (and Toward a Richer Conception of Diversity),” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 31, no. 1 (2016): 196, 229. 51. Many have written on this subject, but for a good recent overview, see Santosh Khadka, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, and Keith Dorwick, eds., Marginalized

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Identities in Higher Education Inside and Outside the Academy (New York: Routledge, 2019). 52. Robert Kelchen, “A Look at Pell Grant Recipients’ Graduation Rates,” Brown Center Chalkboard, October 25, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.bro​​oking​​s​.edu​​/blog​​/brow​​n​-cen​​ ter​-c​​halkb​​oard/​​2017/​​10​/25​​/a​-lo​​ok​-at​​-pell​​-gran​​t​-rec​​ipie​n​​ts​-gr​​aduat​​ion​-r​​ates/​. 53. Hirono Okahana, “Data Sources: Increasing Number of Graduate and Professional Students Former Pell Recipients,” Council of Graduate Schools, July 2, 2018, accessed February 17, 2020, https​:/​/cg​​snet.​​org​/d​​ata​-s​​ource​​s​-inc​​reasi​​ng​-nu​​ mber-​​gradu​​ate​-a​​nd​-pr​​ofess​​ional​​-stud​​ents-​​are​-f​​or​mer​​-pell​​-reci​​pient​​s​-0. 54. Laura McKenna, “The College President-to-Adjunct Pay Ratio,” The Atlantic, September 24, 2015, accessed January 13, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​om​/ed​​ucati​​ on​/ar​​chive​​/2015​​/09​/i​​ncome​​-ineq​​ualit​​y​-in-​​highe​​r​-edu​​catio​​n​-the​​-coll​​ege​-p​​resid​​ent​-t​​​o​ -adj​​unct-​​pay​-r​​atio/​​40702​​9/. 55. Adam Harris, “The Death of an Adjunct,” The Atlantic, April 8, 2019, accessed March 1, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​om​/ed​​ucati​​on​/ar​​chive​​/2019​​/04​/a​​djunc​​t​-pro​​ fesso​​rs​-hi​​gher-​​educa​​tion​-​​thea-​​hunte​​r​/586​​168/.​ 56. Paul N. Friga, “Under Covid-19, University Budgets Like We’ve Never Seen Before,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 20, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.chr​​onicl​​e​.com​​ /arti​​cle​/U​​nder-​​Covid​​-19​-U​​niver​​​sity/​​24857​​4. 57. Vimal Patel, “Covid-19 Is a Pivotal Moment for Struggling Students. Can Colleges Step Up?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.chr​​ onicl​​e​.com​​/arti​​cle​/C​​ovid-​​19​-Is​​-a​-Pi​​votal​​​-Mome​​nt​/24​​8501.​ 58. Elizabeth M. Lee, “‘Where People Like Me Don’t Belong’: Faculty Members from Low-Socioeconomic Status Backgrounds,” Sociology of Education 90, no. 3 (May 26, 2017): 197–212. 59. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 105. 60. There is a burgeoning movement to decolonize museums and recognize collecting institutions as anything but culturally neutral—much in the same way that Ricoeur argues against the primacy of the historian’s voice—and many activists Mike Murawski and La Tanya Autry are leading the charge. Mike Murawski, “Museums Are Not Neutral,” Art Museum Teaching, August 31, 2017, https​:/​/ar​​tmuse​​umtea​​ ching​​.com/​​2017/​​08​/31​​/muse​​ums​-a​​re​-no​​​t​-neu​​tral/​. 61. See bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (New York: Routledge, 2000), 36–37. 62. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 119.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ardoin, Sonja. College Aspirations and Access in Working-Class Rural Communities: The Mixed Signals, Challenges, and New Language First-Generation Students Encounter. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2018. Bartik, Timothy J., and Brad Hershbein. “Degrees of Poverty: Family Income Background and the College Earnings Premium.” Upjohn Institute mimeo. Kalamazoo, MI: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2016.

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Bell, Terrel H., Elliot L. Richardson, and Peter P. Muirhead, eds. “Trends in Postsecondary Education.” U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, October 1970. Chambliss, Daniel F., and Christopher G. Takacs. How College Works. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. College Board. “Discover AP.” Accessed April 1, 2020. https://ap​.collegeboard​ .org. Cooper, Clayton Sedgwick. Why Go To College? New York: Century, 1912. Friga, Paul N. “Under Covid-19, University Budgets Like We’ve Never Seen Before.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 20, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.chr​​onicl​​e​ .com​​/arti​​cle​/U​​nder-​​Covid​​-19​-U​​niver​​​sity/​​24857​​4. Geiger, Roger L., ed. The American College in the Nineteenth Century. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Harris, Adam. “The Death of an Adjunct.” The Atlantic, April 8, 2019. Accessed March 1, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​om​/ed​​ucati​​on​/ar​​chive​​/2019​​/04​/a​​djunc​​t​ -pro​​fesso​​rs​-hi​​gher-​​educa​​tion-​​​thea-​​hunte​​r​/586​​168/. Harvard University. “History.” Accessed February 23, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.har​​vard.​​ edu​/a​​bout-​​harva​​rd​/ha​​rvard​​-glan​​​ce​/hi​​story​. hooks, bell. Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York: Routledge, 2000. Horn, Francis F. “Who Should Go To College?” The Educational Forum, May 1955, 399–406. Hutchinson, Philo A. A People’s History of American Higher Education. New York: Routledge, 2020. Illinois Student Association Commission. “Monetary Award Program (MAP).” Accessed March 30, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.isa​​c​.org​​/stud​​ents/​​durin​​g​-col​​lege/​​types​​-of​-f​​ inanc​​ial​-a​​id​/gr​​ants/​​monet​​​ary​-a​​ward-​​progr​​am/. Jack, Anthony. The Privileged Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. Jackson, Leon. “The Rights of Man and the Rites of Youth: Fraternity and Riot at Eighteenth-Century Harvard.” In The American College in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Roger L. Geiger, 46–80. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Kelchen, Robert. “A look at Pell Grant Recipients’ Graduation Rates.” Brown Center Chalkboard, October 25, 2017. https​:/​/ww​​w​.bro​​oking​​s​.edu​​/blog​​/brow​​n​-cen​​ter​-c​​ halkb​​oard/​​2017/​​10​/25​​/a​-lo​​ok​-at​​-pell​​-gran​​t​-rec​​ipien​​​ts​-gr​​aduat​​ion​-r​​ates/​. Khadka, Santosh, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, and Keith Dorwick, eds. Marginalized Identities in Higher Education Inside and Outside the Academy. New York: Routledge, 2019. Lee, Elizabeth M. “‘Where People Like Me Don’t Belong’: Faculty Members from Low-Socioeconomic Status Backgrounds.” Sociology of Education 90, no. 3 (May 26, 2017): 197–212. March, Robert H. Physics for Poets. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996. McKenna, Laura. “The College President-to-Adjunct Pay Ratio.” The Atlantic, September 24, 2015. Accessed January 13, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​om​/ed​​ ucati​​on​/ar​​chive​​/2015​​/09​/i​​ncome​​-ineq​​ualit​​y​-in-​​highe​​r​-edu​​catio​​n​-the​​-coll​​ege​-p​​resid​​ ent​-t​​​o​-adj​​unct-​​pay​-r​​atio/​​40702​​9/.

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Mellen, Roger. “The Press, Paper Shortages, and Revolution in Early America.” Media History 21, no. 1 (December 2014): 23–41. Murawski, Mike. “Museums Are Not Neutral.” Art Museum Teaching, August 31, 2017. https​:/​/ar​​tmuse​​umtea​​ching​​.com/​​2017/​​08​/31​​/muse​​ums​-a​​re​-no​​​t​-neu​​tral/​. Okahana, Hirono. “Data Sources: Increasing Number of Graduate and Professional Students Former Pell Recipients.” Council of Graduate Schools, July 2, 2018, accessed February 17, 2020. https​:/​/cg​​snet.​​org​/d​​ata​-s​​ource​​s​-inc​​reasi​​ng​-nu​​mber-​​ gradu​​ate​-a​​nd​-pr​​ofess​​ional​​-stud​​ents-​​are​-f​​orm​er​​-pell​​-reci​​pient​​s​-0. Palmer, Alice Freeman. Why Go To College? New York: Crowell, 1897. Patel, Vimal. “Covid-19 Is a Pivotal Moment for Struggling Students. Can Colleges Step Up?” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.chr​​onicl​​e​ .com​​/arti​​cle​/C​​ovid-​​19​-Is​​-a​-Pi​​votal​​-​Mome​​nt​/24​​8501. Postsecondary National Policy Institute. “Rural Students in Higher Education.” FactSheets. Published March 21, 2020. https​:/​/pn​​pi​.or​​g​/rur​​al​-st​​udent​​s​-in-​​highe​​ r​-​edu​​catio​​n/. Pruitt. Lisa R. “Who’s Afraid of White Class Migrants? On Denial, Discrediting and Disdain (and Toward a Richer Conception of Diversity).” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 31, no. 1 (2016): 196–254. Rank, Mark A. “Poverty in America is Mainstream.” New York Times, November 3, 2013. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rudolph, Frederick. The American College and University: A History. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Shelley, Henry C. John Harvard and His Times. Boston: Little, Brown, 1907. Shepard, Thomas. New England’s First Fruits. Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1853. Thelen, Kathleen. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2004. Thelin, John. American Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. United Nations General Assembly. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” December 10, 1948. U.S. Census Bureau, Education and Social Stratification Branch. “Table A-2: Percent of People 25 Years and Over Who Have Completed High School or College, by Race, Hispanic Origin and Sex: Selected Years 1940 to 2019.” Microsoft Excel sheet. 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w2​.ce​​nsus.​​gov​/p​​rogra​​ms​-su​​rveys​​/demo​​/tabl​​es​/ed​​ucati​​onal-​​ attai​​nment​​/time​​-seri​​es​/cp​​s​-his​​toric​​al​-ti​​​me​-se​​ries/​​taba-​​2​.xls​​x. Witherspoon, John. “Address to the Inhabitant of Jamaica and Other West-India Islands on Behalf of the College of New Jersey, 1775.” In The Works of John Witherspoon, D.D., vol. 8, 9–340. Edinburgh: Printed for J. Ogle, ParliamentSquare, 1815. ———. The Works of John Witherspoon, D.D., vol. 8. Edinburgh: Printed for J. Ogle, Parliament-Square, 1815.

Chapter 13

Doing Time and Narrative Teaching in (and out of) Prisons with Paul Ricoeur Howard Pickett

A used composition notebook sits on the edge of my office desk. It belongs to a student I may never see again. Mr. Morales (not his real name) was one of twenty students in the first course I taught at the state prison. After a first week of introductions, discussions, and short assignments, the department of corrections e-mailed to say that Mr. Morales would no longer be in my class. He had been transferred to another facility suddenly—and mysteriously. No contact information would follow. Sobered by the experience, I found myself asking the question that animates this study: How should we teach and learn in the face of such vulnerability? More precisely, how might a compelling account of the vulnerable human being inform or even transform higher education, including a growing number of college courses offered in prisons? That question finds one of its better answers in dialogue with French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005). Why Ricoeur? For one thing, Ricoeur understood better than most both the possibilities and the challenges of combining educational pursuits with long periods of confinement. Ricoeur spent five years in a German prisoner of war camp from 1940 to 1945. While imprisoned by the Nazis, he helped organize and teach academic courses for fellow prisoners of war. His prison camp university (L’université de l’oflag) was so successful that, after the war, the French government issued degrees to many of its students.1 For another, Ricoeur was an academic innovator. He spent the decades after the war advocating for university reforms, including in France’s most popular newspaper, Le Monde.2 Inspired by the possibilities of reform, Ricoeur gave up his prestigious position at the Sorbonne in 1967 to join the faculty of the new, experimental university at nearby Nanterre, where he soon 277

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became dean of faculty. Unfortunately, Ricoeur’s time in administration was cut short before he could make many changes. He resigned in the wake of the student uprisings of the period, during which he was mocked (“Ricoeur, old clown” was scrawled on the school walls) and attacked (in one case by a student on horseback with a lance).3 While first-hand experience may recommend him, Ricoeur’s philosophical work provides the ultimate justification for his central place in my argument. His account of the “capable human being [l’homme capable]”—the capable, yet vulnerable human being, to be exact—forms the groundwork for rethinking the relationship between education and incarceration. Drawing on several essays from the end of his life, my argument advances in three steps. First, I highlight the main vulnerabilities an incarcerated person faces in relation to key capabilities, including a so-called “narrative capability.” Second, I explain why Ricoeur endorsed the “capabilities approach” to social justice and Amartya Sen’s view that we have “rights to certain capabilities.” Third and finally, I conclude by arguing that inadequate educational opportunities make for a criminal injustice system and an unjust university. In effect, I conclude by echoing Ricoeur’s own most important claim about the carceral system: “We are reminded of the sad fact that the whole society is tested by, and if I may put it this way, judged by its way of dealing with the problem of depriving people of their liberty, which has replaced corporal punishment behind the walls of our prisons.”4 1. A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE I CAN(’T) By any measure, Paul Ricoeur was prolific. Thirty books and over 500 essays span seven decades, from his earliest work in the 1930s and 1940s (including a translation of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s Ideas written from prison) to his final essays on recognition and rights composed shortly before his death in 2005 at the age of ninety-two. His publications span an impressive array of perspectives (religious and philosophical, analytic and continental) and topics, too (including the philosophy of the will, Freudian psychology, literary interpretation, biblical studies, and ethics). Although wide-ranging, Ricoeur’s work is driven by one main question: “Who am I?” or, rather, “Who are we?” Simply put, “What does it mean to be human?” To answer that question, Ricoeur poured himself into an examination of the human condition, his “phenomenology of the I can,” complete with detailed analyses of our various capabilities.5 During a 1999 retrospective on his work at the University of Chicago, where he taught for two decades after leaving Nanterre, Ricoeur observed that the “overarching . . . problem” of his career had been “human capability” or “capability as the cornerstone

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of philosophical anthropology.”6 Although countless capabilities surface in his work (e.g., remembering, promising, forgiving, and even forgetting), Ricoeur’s standard catalogue includes four main abilities. The human being—each and every human being, whether incarcerated or not—is the one who has the potential to (1) speak, (2) act, (3) narrate, and (4) impute. Human Capabilities (1) Speech The capacity to speak is fundamental to human life. We are symbol-using animals. Speech gives us the power of communication and also “self-designation,” implicit in the everyday use of personal pronouns: I, me, mine.7 Speech appears at the start of Ricoeur’s list of capacities, because “all the others imply the use of language.”8 Speech is, however, not limited to verbal remarks or to people with that ability. What Ricoeur emphasizes is “the ability spontaneously to produce an intelligible discourse,”9 whatever the means (e.g., ASL, etc.).10 (2) Action The capacity to act is also fundamental to our lives. We are world-makers or world-shapers, at least. Ricoeur highlights a person’s capacity “to initiate a sequence of events by his or her intervention in the course of things,” typically with a more or less deliberate purpose.11 Speech may be primary, but action is central: “Here we touch upon the heart of the idea of capacity, namely, the ability to do something, what in English is designated by the term agency.”12 Although distinct, the capacities build on one another: “Each stage is the condition of the possibility for the next one.”13 (3) Narration Speech and action combine in a third overlooked capacity: to narrate. We are storytelling creatures. The ability to recount a story, including about oneself, occupies a “pre-eminent place among the capacities . . . inasmuch as events of every kind become discernible and intelligible only when recounted in stories.”14 Unlike a thing, which stays fairly constant, a person undergoes transformations, weaving together past and present experiences into the “narrative unity of a life.”15 Consequently—and here’s the important point—when we deny the ability to change (e.g., when we presume that the forty-year old is exactly the same as he was when first incarcerated at twenty), we deny a person’s humanity and treat that person like a “thing.” As Ricoeur reminds us in his three-volume work, Time and Narrative, “To answer the question ‘Who?’ . . . is to tell the story of a life.”16 Humans not

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only have stories—but we are stories. And we need the opportunity to share our stories with others. (4) Imputation To these capacities, Ricoeur adds one more power: to impute or hold responsible. Speech may be “most primitive”; action, “the heart of the idea”; and narration, “pre-eminent.” But only when we arrive at the ability to hold ourselves and others accountable does “the notion of a capable subject [reach] its highest significance.”17 A person is not just the doer of an action but also its author. I’m praised or blamed for them, depending on details. This “capacity of an agent to fall under the judgment of imputation” is the basis of moral responsibility. Like narration, it involves “a kind of inscription,”18 “inscribing oneself in a ‘we.’”19 It depends on “our capacity to submit our action to the requirements of a symbolic order,” which is the “condition for binding a self to a norm.”20 Before turning to our corresponding vulnerabilities, a few clarifications are in order. First, these capacities are fundamental to our humanity. If Ricoeur is right, to treat others humanely (i.e., humanly), we must treat people as bearers of these abilities. According to Ricoeur, these capacities are the grounds of our human worth and dignity: “If one asks by what right the self is declared to be worthy of esteem, it must be answered that it is not principally by reason of its accomplishments but fundamentally by reason of its capacities.”21 Second, while we should treat people as bearers of these capacities, neither the capacities nor their worth can be proven—to others or, for that matter, to ourselves. We presume rather than know we can act (i.e., freely, intentionally) and that we are accountable (i.e., morally). In Ricoeur’s terminology, nearly every aspect of our lives (what we say, do, and think) attests to our capacities.22 Although attestation suffers from “its own special fragility, to which is added the vulnerability of a discourse aware of its own lack of foundation,”23 that threat is always accompanied by a “trust greater than any suspicion.”24 Third, despite their close connections, “capacities” and “capabilities” are not the same. At one end of a spectrum stands a “capacity” or potential. At the other end stands an “accomplishment,” the capacity realized, a “functioning” or “achievement,” as capabilities theorists say.25 Between the two stands the “capability.” While everyone has the human “capacities,” only those who have them inwardly cultivated and externally supported—who really can convert them into actual achievements—enjoy them as “capabilities” or “substantive freedoms.”26 Fourth, like Kant’s autonomy, a capacity is both “a condition of possibility” (an inherent aspect of the human being) and also a “task to be accomplished” (a characteristic to be cultivated).27 Moreover, because capacities

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are givens—“belonging to a logic of all or nothing,” unlike capabilities or aptitudes, which have to develop and mature over time28—Ricoeur dodges the troubling suggestion that some of us are neither human nor worthy of respect.29 While we may say someone lacks a capacity (e.g., when her probability of speaking nears zero), what we mean is that she lacks the capability, the internal skills and/or external conditions needed to convert that dormant capacity into a realized achievement.30 Fifth and finally, no capacity appears on the scene in full flower. Furthermore, while the cultivation of our capabilities may be a task for each of us, it is not a task for us alone: “The transition from the notion of the capable human being to that of the real subject of rights” (i.e., one with realized capabilities) depends on others.31 To realize our full humanity, we rely, first and foremost, on the kindness of others: friends, strangers, and the communities as well as the institutions we inhabit. Human Vulnerabilities Of course, the human being is marked not only by capabilities but also by vulnerabilities—not only by what we can do but also by what we can’t. Each capacity is accompanied by its shadow side, a vulnerability, a “fragility,”32 an “incapacity.”33 However, by Ricoeur’s own admission, analyzing vulnerabilities requires more than an abstract examination of the human being (phenomenology’s “eidetics”). Instead, it requires observing the concrete conditions of particular people’s lives, a “sociology of action” plus a “history of mores.”34 Although Ricoeur focused little of his work—perhaps, too little—on these vulnerabilities, “Autonomy and Vulnerability” is the rare exception, a late-career lecture that highlights our vulnerabilities and (of special importance here) the vulnerabilities of individuals facing incarceration. (1) Speech Those of us who face incarceration (as future possibility, current reality, or past experience) may be vulnerable, first off, due to an inability to speak. When it comes to the court system, Ricoeur says, “We cannot overemphasize this incapacity [of speech]”; after all, the “law [rests] on the victory language gains over violence.”35 The accused may lack adequate voice, in part, because they lack adequate legal representation. One recent estimate reports that nearly three-fourths of county public defender offices exceed the maximum recommended caseload.36 In 2013, a federal judge found that publicly appointed defense attorneys in Washington state were working less than an hour per case.37 This incapacity of speech or self-representation both

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precedes and follows incarceration. All but two states deny the right to vote to incarcerated individuals and eleven continue to deny it even after release.38 (2) Action This “inability to speak” bleeds into a “discussion of those fragilities in the order of action.”39 According to Ricoeur, “We need to take into consideration the kinds of unequal distribution of the ability to act, especially those that result from hierarchies of command and authority in societies based on efficiency and competition.”40 Consider, for instance, the criminalization of the “side hustle,” the entrepreneurial activity of the late Eric Garner, selling loose cigarettes on a Staten Island, New York sidewalk.41 Or consider the fact that workers who are incarcerated earn on average between $.33–$1.41/ hour.42 For that matter, consider the difficulties of reentry and employment for formerly incarcerated people. Although promising in theory, efforts to “ban the box” (on job or housing applications that make applicants indicate if they have felony records) seem to hurt Black males, who may be presumed to have a record even when they do not.43 (3) Narration Furthermore, we all face the challenge of maintaining what Ricoeur calls a “narrative identity,” which “combines the concordance of the ongoing plot and the discordance of the peripeteia, such as changes in fortune, reversals, upheavals, unexpected events, and so forth.”44 However, that challenge may be especially pronounced for individuals with felony records, who must weave together pre- and postincarcerated experiences and perspectives. In Ricoeur’s words, “Jurists run the . . . risk of having to deal with individuals who are incapable of constructing a narrative identity.”45 Individuals may be refused acquittal, probation, clemency, employment, housing, or the right to vote, in part, because society refuses to grant them the complexity of narrative identity. In the words of author, attorney, and activist Bryan Stevenson, society may refuse to believe that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”46 Society dehumanizes individuals when refusing to recognize a narrative complexity that is quintessentially human. (4) Imputation We weave together not only past and present but also individual and collective identities. Each of us must hold together our singularity (we are unique and irreplaceable) and our sociality (we are constituted by the communities we inhabit).47 There is, Ricoeur says, a “difficulty that everyone has in inscribing his or her action and behavior into a symbolic order.”48 In particular, relating oneself and one’s story to a moral framework is no easy task.

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However, that difficulty may become a near “impossibility” for “those whom our sociopolitical order excludes,” who may experience a “loss of the sense of the pertinence of some founding narratives” or “a weakened influence of the seduction of heroes of the moral life.”49 Society’s moral and historical frameworks may be especially ill-suited to us when those narratives (e.g., manifest destiny) and their heroes (e.g., slaveholding founding fathers) ignore or even condone one’s oppression.50 2. THE SUBJECT OF RIGHTS In short, capabilities matter. If Ricoeur is right, narrative capability is as much a basic need as are more familiar needs: food, clothing, and shelter. Each of us has a strong interest in weaving together an identity—out of both past and present experiences (narration) and into a community’s traditions and institutions (imputation). Everyone desires and deserves what Ricoeur, following Hegel, calls “recognition,” acceptance by others as fully human, as the moral equal of everyone else. Given this interest, several questions arise: Can we cultivate narrative capability? If so, what type of curriculum might be most effective at doing so? Whose responsibility, if anyone’s, is it to cultivate narrative capability? Most controversially, perhaps, do people who are incarcerated have a right to narrative capability? Ricoeur rarely offers direct answers to specific ethical questions. Instead, he provides a framework (or frameworks) for thinking about those questions. Although not as well-known as the “little ethics” of Oneself as Another, Ricoeur’s final works, The Course of Recognition and “Capabilities and Rights,” provide an approach rooted in the Hegelian concept of recognition. For Ricoeur, recognition serves to “bridge the logical gap” between his empirical work in philosophical anthropology and his normative work in ethics and philosophy of law.51 In his own words, recognition provides the “connecting link” from is to ought—in this case, from the “is” of capabilities to the “ought” of rights.52 Capabilities to Rights Ricoeur’s focus on “the struggle for recognition” seems especially relevant to my argument here, given the invisibility (nonrecognition) and vilification (misrecognition) of individuals who are or have been incarcerated.53 As I mean now to show, Ricoeur’s treatment of recognition moves through three main stages, which provide, as it were, three steps toward a right to narrative capability. First, “recognition as identification”54 refers to the epistemic process of “identifying something in general as being itself and not something else.”55

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On its own, this notion raises a number of interesting questions—for instance, what recognition challenges do parents and children separated by long sentences face upon release? However, the second stage, “recognizing oneself,” is more relevant here.56 When we really see ourselves, we see ourselves—more accurately, attest to ourselves—in light of our fundamental capacities.57 Furthermore, “To this idea of attestation remain attached those of appreciation, of evaluation”; there is, in Ricoeur’s words, an “ethical mark placed on the attestation of capacities.”58 Recognition involves not just believing in our capacities but also valuing ourselves because of them. Self-recognition takes us eventually to a third and final stage of “mutual recognition,” the ethical and political acknowledgment of everyone’s equal worth. Through self-recognition, we come to esteem all selves. In his earlier “little ethics,” Ricoeur had observed: “It is not by chance that we have continually been speaking of esteem of the self [estime de soi] and not esteem of myself [estime de moi]. To say self is not to say myself.”59 When we really see ourselves, we see the other selves around us, selves with similar capacities and equal worth. Like the earlier “little ethics,” Ricoeur’s ethics of recognition is rooted in a Kantian respect for others.60 Yet that abstract Kantian respect must be embodied, as Hegel had reminded us, in particular institutions and rights. Rights to Capabilities In the transition from self-recognition to mutual recognition, Ricoeur inserts a crucial endorsement of Amartya Sen’s claim that there are “rights to certain capabilities.”61 As Ricoeur notes, Sen maintains that respect for people requires concern for both agency and well-being, “recognizing and respecting [a person’s] ability to form goals, commitments, values, etc.”62 According to Sen, if we value a person’s agency or liberty, then we must provide (if able) the resources needed for its “actual exercise.”63 Genuine respect for agency or freedom involves respecting “negative and positive liberty,” both freedom from interference and also freedom to act in self-determined ways.64 Therefore, Ricoeur agrees with Sen’s view that people have rights to basic capabilities, positive rights to the provision of goods and services necessary for substantive freedoms. This admittedly controversial claim raises tough questions about rights and responsibilities, some of which Ricoeur addresses, if too briefly, by announcing a “collective responsibility to ensure individual liberty in both its positive and negative forms.”65 How this shared responsibility should be allocated to particular individuals is, of course, tricky, but it’s worth noting that Ricoeur acknowledges the importance of that allocation. Unlike Sen, for whom rights

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are rights whether anyone has obligations to fulfill them or not, Ricoeur stands closer to thinkers like philosopher Onora O’Neill, for whom rights are nonexistent “unless obligations have been [legitimately] allocated” to particular others.66 More accurately, Ricoeur stands somewhere between Sen and O’Neill: rights are rights when the obligations can be allocated to others, not just when they have been allocated. Allocating duties as well as realizing rights unfolds over time and through institutions, part of the “struggle for recognition.”67 Following Hegel, Ricoeur acknowledges that recognition and rights walk hand in hand. In particular, the rights at the heart of our judicial system are central to recognizing each of us as “free and equal to every other person.”68 Treating the other person as anything other than a person (i.e., as some thing rather than a free and equal self worthy of respect) is a moral wrong and a category mistake. However, which rights does recognition require? Libertarians like Jan Narveson presume that recognition requires little more than noninterference.69 It involves respecting, in Ricoeur’s words, “the civil rights” of other people: “negative rights that protect a person’s life, liberty, and property from unauthorized . . . interference.”70 Pushed a bit further, it may also involve respecting the “political rights” of others: the “positive rights guaranteeing a person the opportunity to participate in the processes of public will-formation” (e.g., voting).71 However, Ricoeur goes even further, maintaining that recognition also involves respecting “social rights”: “positive rights that ensure a person’s fair share in the distribution of basic goods,” including the resources and institutional supports necessary for fundamental capabilities.72 Why? The answer to that question lies, I think, in Ricoeur’s view of humanity. According to his essay, “Who Is the Subject of Rights?” (1995), Ricoeur agrees with the liberal tradition’s insistence on basic human rights, “rights attached to human beings as human beings and not as members of some political community conceived of as the source of positive rights.”73 However, he rejects the “ultra-individualistic version of liberalism” that “misconceives the anthropological status of our power to speak, to act, to recount, to impute . . . and claims to go directly to the actual accomplishments of individuals.”74 In short, liberalism is right to emphasize the importance of fundamental human capacities, but it is wrong when it presumes that our capabilities can be cultivated and maintained apart from particular communities. For Ricoeur, our fundamental “capacities would remain virtual, even aborted or repressed, in the absence of interpersonal and institutional mediations.”75 In Ricoeur’s estimation, because people deserve recognition as capable, yet vulnerable subjects, then people also deserve interpersonal and institutional assistance. Libertarians who assume we can recognize and respect others by leaving them alone fail to realize that there is no one there to respect (no fully

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formed person, at any rate) if left all alone. Granted, this positive recognition raises thorny questions about Kant’s “wide and imperfect duties”: Who has what responsibilities to whom exactly?76 Nevertheless, Ricoeur believes that thorny question can be answered—indeed, already has been answered. Our collective duties have been assigned more or less explicitly through our key social institutions, including criminal justice and higher education. 3. EDUCATION FOR NARRATIVE IDENTITY In addition to overarching frameworks (e.g., the “little ethics”), Ricoeur also turns sometimes to “regional ethics” (i.e., “applied ethics”),77 examining challenges of “application” and “the movement from the norm to the case in question.”78 Specifically, Ricoeur focuses on the challenging judgments that face medical and legal professionals and how their practical decisions might be informed and transformed by a better understanding of the nature and scope of the institutions they inhabit and represent. As I now mean to demonstrate, a Ricoeurian understanding of criminal justice and higher education points to a duty to promote narrative capability for people experiencing incarceration. Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Incarceration Some may suppose people who are incarcerated have no right to narrative capability. After all, incarceration curbs capabilities, limiting liberties and suspending rights—notably, freedom of movement. However, according to Ricoeur, these individuals maintain many (not all) of their rights, a right to education among them. To see why, consider, first, the goals of the penal system. In Ricoeur’s words, “punishment has two ends, a short-term one, which is the protection of society as regards a threat to public order, and a long-term one, which is the restoration of social peace.”79 In terms borrowed from The Course of Recognition, criminal justice aims at “states of peace,” a fully flowered “mutual recognition.”80 Therefore, each stage of the criminal justice system should promote the peace that comes with the genuine recognition of all, something that requires, as I come to argue, the appropriate kind of education. For starters, the trial recognizes (ideally, at least) the rights of all, even as it determines whether to curb some of the rights of the accused. To tame the impulse to vengeance, the judicial process (when done right) inserts a “third person” (or equivalent) between victim and accused.81 A code of law, the hearing, a judge, and a sentence proportional to the crime all stand between otherwise feuding parties to avoid an endless cycle of revenge. A “just distance” is thereby established between parties, one that attests to “equality in

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the value of every agent.”82 The trial recognizes the value and rights of each person: the victim, whose value was ignored by the “primary violence” of the crime, and the accused, whose value would be ignored by a subsequent violence of vengeance and still could be ignored (if things go awry) by the “legal violence” of the sentence.83 Furthermore, it is not enough to say that the incarcerated individual received his or her day in court. Carceral practices must also be just, governed by the goals of recognition and peace. If not, then they are part of a criminal injustice system. For starters, the sanction must recognize the value of those aspects of society threatened by the crime: (1) the victim; (2) the public; and (3) the norms of society. However, the sanction also recognizes the value of “the guilty one, the condemned person.”84 In part, it does so to educate the rest of society. Specifically, by treating the condemned person as a person, worthy of respect and recognition, a humane sanction serves as a “catharsis of vengeance.”85 The convicted individual is always more than a mere “convict.” However, the sanction is (in theory, at least) compatible with this view, with the recognition of the incarcerated person’s dignity and humanity. In fact, like Hegel before him, Ricoeur maintains that the suspension of rights and capabilities mandated by the sentence is itself a sign of respect: “From the rendering of the sanction, the accused knows himself to be recognized at least as a reasonable, responsible being, that is, as the author of his acts.”86 The sanction has limits, however. Some, but not all rights and capabilities can be justly curtailed. The death penalty, which Hegel sees as a “way of ‘honoring the guilty person as a rational being,’” must be ruled out, Ricoeur thinks.87 The state should “prohibit itself from itself acting like a criminal in the figure of the executioner.”88 Long sentences are typically also ruled out. “Beyond a certain time span the execution of a sentence is equivalent to an accelerated process of desocialization,” one which, Ricoeur fears, might reduce the incarcerated human being to a “ferocious beast.”89 Consequently, “A ‘life sentence’ constitutes a flagrant negation of any idea of rehabilitation, and in this sense completely negates any project of reestablishment . . . of a just distance between the detainee and the rest of society.”90 Recognizing the value of the person who is incarcerated also rules out overly restrictive prison policies: “All those measures that do not contribute to the defense and protection of society need to be gradually suppressed.”91 Despite these limits, Ricoeur was no prison abolitionist. By his own admission, “It is a fact that we have no viable project for the total abolition of imprisonment.”92 However, that fact is a tragic one, Ricoeur believes. The “absence of a practical alternative to . . . imprisonment” is a “collective failure on the part of society.”93 Moreover, in response to that failure, “what remains is the duty to preserve for those detainees the possibility of their reinscription into the community of free citizens, the project of a recovery of

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their full citizenship.”94 In short, incarceration is necessary, but regrettable. It is also—or should be—temporary. The sanction must give way to pardon. Prior to pardon, however, comes a second, intermediate step: rehabilitation—in Ricoeur’s words, “the set of measures accompanying the execution of a sentence, meant to restore the condemned person to full citizenship again at the end of his sentence.”95 If the sanction restores the law, rehabilitation restores fundamental capabilities and rights to the condemned person. Although Ricoeur says it involves “restoring a person to the rightful place, capacity, and legal status he has lost,”96 it is surely the capability, not the capacity that is restored. This process “wipes away all incapacities and loss of rights,”97 a process that takes time and sets additional limits on incarceration. In addition to long sentences, life sentences, and the death penalty, Ricoeur rejects many other prohibitions. He objects to the denial of resources and opportunities related to “health, work, schooling, leisure, visitation rights, even the normal expression of sexuality and so on.”98 While some rights and capabilities may be curbed to promote safety and reform, not all should be. For our purposes, Ricoeur’s emphasis on education (here, “schooling”) is most relevant. In Ricoeur’s words, “projects of reeducation aimed at the resocialization of condemned prisoners” are part of “the pedagogy of sentencing.”99 Granted, the term “reeducation” is an eerie term, recalling as it does Big Brother’s use of “re-education” to control the people of George Orwell’s 1984.100 While “re-education” and prison programs, in general, can be coercive and manipulative, as philosopher Michel Foucault has argued, Ricoeur holds that they are not necessarily so.101 Indeed, as I now mean to show, the re-education of 1984, like the excessively disciplinary modern prison Foucault analyzes, is, in Ricoeur’s estimation, no real education at all. To explain that point and also to explain what form of schooling is best-suited to rehabilitation and reentry, I turn now to Ricoeur’s philosophy of education. Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Education Whether or not Ricoeur has a fully formed philosophy of education, I return to “Autonomy and Vulnerability” to draw out his view of education—and the centrality of narrative to it.102 Before doing so, though, it is worth noting that Ricoeur’s best essay on education is also his best essay on vulnerability and the vulnerability of incarcerated individuals, at that. Simply put, the key issues under consideration here—education, incarceration, vulnerability, and narrative—are intimately tied to one another in Ricoeur’s eyes. Unsurprisingly, Ricoeur’s view of education builds on his philosophical anthropology. Ricoeur writes, albeit obliquely, of “responsibility and autonomy, which we shall rediscover later to be the place of all pedagogy, all

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education.”103 In short, education is tasked with navigating a route from the vulnerable to the autonomous self. While education could—even should— cultivate any and all key capabilities, “Autonomy and Vulnerability” focuses on one power above all: “our capacity to submit our action to the requirements of a symbolic order.”104 As Ricoeur explains, this power of “identifying [ourselves] not only through some history but with some history” is what undergirds both narrative identity and moral responsibility.105 In other words, education faces two important tasks. It helps students weave together (1) their past and present experiences (i.e., identifying through some individual history); as well as (2) their singularity and sociality (i.e., identifying with some communal history). Both tasks have their challenges. To achieve the former, what Ricoeur calls a “narrative identity,” each of us must overcome the “test of time.”106 Maintaining a unified identity is no easy task, especially for those of us who have undergone dramatic changes from past to present. To accomplish the latter, a “personal identity,” each of us must also overcome the “test of alterity.”107 Maintaining a unified identity is difficult insofar as doing so involves a necessary but threatening “confrontation with other perspectives.”108 As a “communitarian liberal,” Ricoeur recognizes that we are both individual and communal.109 In contrast to the Kantian tradition that (allegedly) equates autonomy with singularity, Ricoeur locates it in the space between selfexpression (“Dare to think for yourself”) and a “symbolic order,”110 between the autos and the nomos. As he explains, “The identity of each person, and hence his or her autonomy, is constructed between . . . two poles”—namely, “the effort to think for oneself and the domination or rule by the other.”111 This navigation or balancing act is central to education: “It is the task of education to bring about an interminable negotiation between our seeking singularity and the social pressure that is always capable of reconstituting those conditions that the Enlightenment called a state of minority.”112 In other words, education—including re-education for incarcerated individuals—involves the endless task of becoming ourselves. It accomplishes that task, though, not only by inviting students to express themselves but also by providing the resources that inform and enable that expression, the resources to think beyond themselves. Education for narrative identity and autonomy provides the “symbolic order” or conceptual framework (communal, legal, historical, moral, etc.) needed to become a self who is recognized (i.e., understood and valued) by others. Yet, at the same time, these frameworks threaten to squash the self. The person is, therefore, tugged between two extremes, “two poles,” as Ricoeur puts it.113 On the one hand, without these communal frameworks, there is no self to express. In Ricoeur’s words, “Without institutional mediation, individuals are only the initial drafts of human persons.”114 However,

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if these frameworks become too dominant, there is no self expressed. In the case of excessive conformity, there is no autonomous subject, but only an automaton. A symbolic order is both “repressive” and “structuring.”115 What, then, does it take to balance these two sides to the self? For Ricoeur, the solution to the clash lies once again in “a just distance,” this time “between singular points of view against the backdrop of a shared understanding.”116 Like criminal justice, education must negotiate the competing demands of multiple selves, not just external (plaintiff vs. defendant) but also internal (singularity vs. sociality).117 There is, Ricoeur says, “a split at the interior of the very concept of identification.”118 What’s more, this “split” and the “interminable negotiation” at the heart of a liberal education bring us back to our need for storytelling and an “education leading to a narrative identity.”119 After all, putting oneself into a “symbolic order” is, as Ricoeur repeatedly says, a type of writing, a “kind of inscription.”120 It involves “inscribing oneself in a ‘we.’”121 Even the act of holding oneself morally responsible has a narrative element to it. Ricoeur recognizes the need for our abstract moral ideas to take the form of particular signs and symbols within historical communities.122 Consequently, he stands somewhere between the liberal, who emphasizes impartiality and universality, and the contextualist, who emphasizes particular symbols and institutions of recognition—that is, somewhere between Nagel and Hegel.123 We identify with our universal human capacities, “as the one who speaks, acts, remembers, imputes.”124 However, we also identify with particular, historical communities. In Ricoeur’s words, “to identify oneself is to identify with heroes, emblematic characters, models, and teachers and also precepts” or “norms.”125 In Ricoeur’s most telling words, “The handling of one’s own life, as a possibly coherent narrative, represents a high level competence that has to be taken as one of the major components of the autonomy of a subject of rights.”126 To say, as I did earlier, that everyone deserves recognition is to say (among other things) that everyone deserves narrative identity and the educational resources necessary to achieve it. However, this responsibility cannot—and should not—fall entirely on individuals employed by our carceral institutions. While those individuals certainly have responsibilities as individuals (e.g., to refrain from abusive behavior), they enact their responsibilities chiefly as office holders, as representatives of the rest of society. More to my point, the responsibility to provide key capabilities is, as Ricoeur explained earlier, a “collective responsibility.”127 To be sure, society’s prisons must continue to provide education for rehabilitation and reentry. Indeed, if Ricoeur is right, they must provide the courses, counseling services, and other programs necessary to guarantee narrative capability for anyone who may otherwise lack it. However, if prisons lack the resources

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to do so, the fault lies with the wider society. Society’s prisons are, after all, society’s prisons. Let me conclude by explaining why I think institutions of higher education ought to play a larger part in fulfilling this societal responsibility. First, they can. Colleges and universities have the faculty and often the infrastructure needed to introduce students to symbolic orders of recognition (e.g., Kantian ethics, Shakespearean tragedy, and critical race theory). Schools with the resources to do more often have a duty to do more. While psychological counselors and peer mentors may be necessary to support the cultivation of a narrative identity, faculty both at the prison and at nearby high schools and universities ought to do our part, too. Second, they should. The race and class inequities behind mass incarceration often demand redress. (Why do some people end up incarcerated, while others end up in college?) Furthermore, higher education has an obligation to prepare unincarcerated students to lead responsible civic lives. To be sure, not every undergraduate can or should take a course in a detention facility. And not every faculty member can or should teach one. However, by their own admission, these classes (when done right, of course) are often among the most challenging, most engaging, and most rewarding around—both for students and for instructors, especially for those of us who sometimes wonder how a liberal education fits within a largely preprofessional university and a profoundly inequitable world. Third and most controversially, they must. If people who are incarcerated have a right to recognition and narrative capability (as I have argued), then our educational institutions, including colleges and universities, will have a part to play in honoring that right. Narrative capability, like any key capability, requires both the right internal skills and the right external environments. Despite Ricoeur’s suggestion, the main threat to narrative capability for incarcerated individuals is not due to any deficiency in incarcerated individuals.128 Rather, in my experience, it is due to a deficiency in the rest of society. Courses that prepare undergraduates and others (e.g., public leaders and policy-makers) to hear better, to recognize the humanity of the individuals experiencing incarceration, are a must in the work of justice. They are a must if people have a right not only to speak but also to be heard—if they have a right not just to “internal capabilities” but to what Martha Nussbaum calls “combined capabilities.”129 How we might go about providing an education for that narrative capability is the subject of my conclusion. But first, a few clarifications are in order. Most importantly, I emphasize a right to capabilities, not functionings. There are risks that come with telling one’s story. Sincerity about one’s past (or present) can make one vulnerable, rather than recognized. Relating some experiences might retraumatize those

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who tell the stories and those to whom they are told. Therefore, more thought should be given to what counts as an “intelligible and acceptable narrative.”130 More thought should also be given to the right role of the audience in hearing certain narratives, especially those that seem unintelligible or unacceptable. Might recognizing others as our moral equals sometimes require us to make room for incoherence or gaps in their stories? Furthermore, could some personal transformations (e.g., from Saul to Paul or from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) be so substantial that they push at the boundaries of a coherent identity? What about those who may be left in disoriented fragments by suffering and trauma? Finally, while those who teach King, Shakespeare, or hooks have a role to play in this work, that role may be a relatively minor one, especially when compared to the crucial work of mental health professionals. In other words, while I claim that institutions of higher education have a responsibility to promote narrative capability for those who are incarcerated, I do not presume that college professors are the only ones who do this work. Counselors, religious leaders, and other classroom instructors (e.g., GED or HVAC instructors) play a crucial role in promoting narrative capability within today’s prisons. Furthermore, I do not presume that professionals are the one only ones who do this work. Countless incarcerated individuals serve as educators and mentors to their fellow residents. Indeed, as I conclude below, incarcerated individuals serve as educators and mentors not only to fellow prison residents but also to those who visit the prisons (e.g., professors and students in InsideOut-style classes that combine incarcerated and unincarcerated students).131 CONCLUSION: A COURSE IN RECOGNITION Having established this right to narrative capability, I want to conclude briefly with some practical recommendations for teaching in prisons—in effect, for a Ricoeurian course in recognition informed by the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities with which my argument began. (1) Speech Offer discussion-based courses with final speeches. People who are incarcerated should have the opportunity to exercise the fundamental capacity of speech. In addition to material supplies (e.g., pens, paper, and dictionaries), one should offer multilingual instruction and/or adequate translation services. Furthermore, seminars are preferable to lectures and nonparticipatory online classes. Because speech entails “the ability spontaneously to produce an intelligible discourse,” it is not enough for students to sit and listen.132 They

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must be able to ask as well as answer questions, pursuing them freely where they lead. Students should be given the opportunity to make speeches—for instance, final speeches that weave together, as they see fit, the symbolic order(s) introduced by coursework and personal perspectives on issues that matter to them. (2) Action Offer more courses and more than courses. Individuals experiencing incarceration deserve opportunities for meaningful action beyond work, chow, and sleep. If every day is like another, how could one demonstrate (or, in some cases, develop) the characteristics necessary for reentry? Clemency and parole petitions often include coursework as evidence (sometimes the only evidence) of readiness for reentry. Consequently, individuals experiencing incarceration often need courses and, even better, sequences of courses and degree programs, which demonstrate long-term commitment and the cultivation of valuable skills. More accurately, students need the opportunity to take multiple courses. To reiterate my earlier point, justice entails “rights to capabilities,” not functionings. Incarcerated individuals should be free to participate, not required to do so. However, these students need more than courses. Specifically, many will need free (or, at least, affordable) college courses, academic credits, worthwhile degrees or credentials, letters of reference, and so on. In addition, as I have been suggesting, these students need even more, including policy reforms and changed societal attitudes. (3) Narration Offer courses for incarcerated and unincarcerated students. Students who are incarcerated need more than courses, pens, and notebooks—though they certainly need those, too. They need more than discussions and final speeches. What they need, often by their own insistence, are widespread social reforms and second chances. To that end, coursework that enables the unincarcerated to think critically about justice, human dignity, and mass incarceration, among other topics, plays a vital part in the process of reform. In particular, courses that bring together incarcerated (“inside”) and unincarcerated (“outside”) students—undergraduates but also (when appropriate and well-managed) state and local officials, clergy, community organizers, and correctional officers—may play a crucial part in that process. Colearning provides the groundwork for (not to say a guarantee of) mutual recognition. Recall that narrative capability requires more than the internal skills to tell one’s story. It also requires external supports, first and foremost among them an audience able and willing to hear that story. Too often, people who are

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incarcerated go unheard. Physical exclusion (not only behind bars but also often in remote locations) makes it hard to be heard. But social exclusion (even after release) can make it even harder. In addition to other injustices, incarcerated individuals face what philosopher Miranda Fricker and others call “epistemic injustice.”133 Doubting everything someone says simply because of something they did (or, perhaps, didn’t do) on their worst day (perhaps, decades ago) is an undue disbelief, what Fricker calls a “testimonial injustice.”134 Furthermore, when audiences (including well-meaning teachers and classmates) compel incarcerated students to shoehorn their unique stories into trite tropes (e.g., of the repentant sinner) and misunderstand their actual experiences, another wrong is committed, Fricker’s “hermeneutical injustice.”135 While justice may not demand that we believe everything someone says, it would be an injustice not to believe anything. Justice urges all of us to give due consideration to each person’s story. (4) Imputation Offer courses that provide the signs and symbols of recognition. In addition to the right kind of course, assignment, and audience, individuals who are incarcerated ought to receive the intellectual resources out of which we craft narrative identities. While opportunities to speak are important, opportunities to listen and read are also important. If Ricoeur is right, being recognized requires not just opportunities for self-expression but also the signs and symbols out of which one can create and articulate—or, at least, discover and disseminate—that self. Of particular relevance for prison courses are readings about justice, love, and forgiveness (e.g., by Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, bell hooks, Simon Wiesenthal, Delores Williams, Wilbert Rideau, or Paul Ricoeur). Regardless of discipline or topic, course materials should provide shared symbols that allow students to engage with one another and with the broader society around the big questions about how we ought to live together. To be clear, making oneself recognizable requires familiarity with, not conformity to, a symbolic order. (Students need not agree with King, but it may be helpful to explain their own views in relation to his. Thinking both charitably and critically is a must for the pursuit of justice.) Regardless of discipline or topic, course materials—as well as course policies and practices—should provide the intellectual, moral, and practical resources for recognition. In short, everything read, said, and done in (and out of) class (from seating arrangements and break policies to office hour availability) should, in Ricoeur’s terms, attest to “equality in the value of every agent.”136 When done properly—when all receive recognition—then, Ricoeur says, “we can say that something is restored, under names as diverse as honor, good reputation, self-respect, and I like to emphasize the term, self-esteem—that

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is, the dignity attached to the moral status of the human person,” each and every person.137

NOTES 1. Charles E. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 12. 2. For an early example of Ricoeur’s thinking on the subject, see “Faire l’Université” (1964). “Reforme et Revolution dans l’Université” (1968) appeared later in Le Monde. See Paul Ricoeur, “Faire l’Université,” in Lectures 1: Autour du Politique (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 368–379, and Paul Ricoeur, “Reforme et Revolution dans l’Université,” in Lectures 1: Autour du Politique (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 380–397. For an overview of Ricoeur’s view of education, see Peter Kemp, “Ricoeur and Education: Ricoeur’s Implied Philosophy of Education” in Ricoeur across the Disciplines, ed. Scott Davidson (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 181–194. 3. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur, 59, 69. 4. Paul Ricoeur, “Justice and Vengeance,” in Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 229–230. 5. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 111. 6. Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response,” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, eds. John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York: Routledge, 2002), 280. 7. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 32. 8. Paul Ricoeur, “Who Is the Subject of Rights?,” in The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2. 9. Paul Ricoeur, “Epilogue: Personal Capacities and Mutual Recognition,” in Philosophical Anthropology, trans. David Pellauer, vol. 3 of Writings and Lectures, ed. Johann Michel and Jérome Porée (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 291. 10. In fact, Ricoeur entertains a very wide scope for communication. In Oneself as Another, he refers to the “exchange, even asymmetrical, of pre-verbal signs . . . between the fetus and its mother” (Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 272). 11. Paul Ricoeur, “The Addressee of Religion: The Capable Human Being,” in Philosophical Anthropology, trans. David Pellauer, vol. 3 of Writings and Lectures, ed. Johann Michel and Jérome Porée (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 270. 12. Ricoeur, “Subject of Rights,” 3, emphasis original. 13. Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability,” 280. 14. Ricoeur, “Epilogue,” 291. 15. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 157. The phrase is Alasdair MacIntyre’s. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 1981), 265. 16. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 246. 17. Ricoeur, “Subject of Rights,” 4.

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18. Ricoeur, “Addressee,” 272. 19. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 88. 20. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 84. 21. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 181. 22. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 21. 23. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 22. 24. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 23. 25. Although Ricoeur rarely uses “achievement” (“Subject of Rights,” 8) and, as far as I can tell, never uses the clunkier “functioning,” Ricoeur’s writings regularly refer, in one way or another, to a realized capacity, for instance, as an “accomplishment” (Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 181. 26. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999), 18, 36; Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2011), 20. See also Sen, Development, 198; Nussbaum, Creating, 21. 27. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 90. Ricoeur points out that “autonomy” appears as a given human characteristic in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and as a trait to be cultivated and achieved, the power to think for oneself in opposition to thoughtless social conformity, according to Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?” (Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 72–73). See Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–22, and “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 133–171. 28. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 271. 29. See Nicholas Wolterstorff’s criticisms of capacity-based explanations of human dignity and human rights. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 329–332. 30. Again, what the individual lacks is what Nussbaum calls the “combined capabilities”: both the cultivated internal skills to do something and the external context allowing for their actual use. Sen, Development, 18, 36; Nussbaum, Creating, 20. See also Sen, 198; Nussbaum, 21. 31. Ricoeur, “Subject of Rights,” 5. 32. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 73. 33. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 75. 34. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 86. 35. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 76. 36. Donald J. Farole Jr. and Lynn Langton, “County-based and Local Public Defender Offices, 2007,” special report, Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, September 2010, https​:/​/ww​​w​.bjs​​.gov/​​conte​​nt​/pu​​b​/pdf​​/clp​d​​o07​.p​​df, 1. 37. See Wilbur v. City of Mount Vernon, No. C11-1100RSL Justia 325, at *3 (W.D. Wash. Dec. 4, 2013), https​:/​/ca​​ses​.j​​ustia​​.com/​​feder​​al​/di​​stric​​t​-cou​​rts​/w​​ashin​​ gton/​​wawdc​​e​/2​:2​​011cv​​01100​​/1769​​60​/32​​​5​/0​.p​​df​?ts​​=1411​​60906​​1. 38. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Felon Voting Rights.” 39. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 77.

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40. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 77. 41. Joseph Goldstein and Marc Santora, “Staten Island Man Dies From Chokehold During Arrest, Autopsy Finds,” The New York Times, August 1, 2014, http://nyti​.ms​/1ohkg8A; Jason Silverstein, “Who Was Alton Sterling?,” New York Daily News, July 6, 2016. 42. Wendy Sawyer, “How Much Do Incarcerated People Make in Each State?,” Prison Policy Initiative, April 10, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.pri​​sonpo​​licy.​​org​/b​​log​/2​​017​/0​​4​​ /10/​​wages​/. 43. Jennifer L. Doleac and Benjamin Hansen, “Does ‘Ban the Box’ Help or Hurt Low-Skilled Workers? Statistical Discrimination and Employment Outcomes When Criminal Histories are Hidden” (working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016). 44. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 79. 45. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 80. 46. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Penguin Random House, 2014), 290. 47. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 81. 48. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 85. 49. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 86. 50. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 81. 51. Paul Ricoeur, “Capabilities and Rights,” in Transforming Unjust Structures: The Capability Approach, ed. Séverine Deneulin, Mathias Nebel, and Nichola Sagovsky (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2006), 17. 52. Ricoeur, “Capabilities and Rights,” 21. 53. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 196. 54. Ricoeur, Course, 23. 55. Ricoeur, “Capabilities,” 21. 56. Ricoeur, Course, 69. 57. Ricoeur, Course, 148–149. 58. Ricoeur, Course, 149. 59. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 180. 60. Ricoeur, Course, 198; Ricoeur, “Capabilities,” 24. 61. Ricoeur, Course, 143. 62. Ricoeur, Course, 142. 63. Ricoeur, Course, 144. 64. Ricoeur, Course, 143. 65. Ricoeur, Course, 144, emphasis added. 66. Onora O’Neill, “The Dark Side of Human Rights,” International Affairs 81, no. 2 (March 2005), 428. 67. Ricoeur, Course, 196. 68. Ricoeur, Course, 197. 69. Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 59–60; O’Neill, “Dark Side,” 428. 70. Ricoeur, Course, 199.

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71. Ricoeur, Course, 199. 72. Ricoeur, Course, 199. 73. Ricoeur, “Subject of Rights,” 9. 74. Ricoeur, “Subject of Rights,” 9. 75. Ricoeur, “Subject of Rights,” 9. 76. Immanuel Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 390. 77. Paul Ricoeur, “Introduction,” in Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2. 78. Ricoeur, “Justice,” 227. Ricoeur’s terminology is adapted from the field of phenomenology—in particular, its distinction between “fundamental ontology” (i.e., the study of being in general) and “regional ontologies” (i.e., the study of particular domains or types of beings). 79. Ricoeur, “Justice,” 230, emphasis added. 80. Ricoeur, Course, 219. 81. Ricoeur, “ Justice,” 224. 82. Ricoeur, “ Justice,” 224. 83. Ricoeur, “ Justice,” 229. 84. Paul Ricoeur, “Sanction, Rehabilitation, Pardon,” in The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 139. 85. Ricoeur, “Sanction, Rehabilitation,” 139, emphasis original. 86. Ricoeur, “Sanction, Rehabilitation,” 139. 87. For Ricoeur’s earlier discussion of the same passage, see “Interpretation of the Myth of Punishment,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 362. 88. Ricoeur, “Sanction, Rehabilitation,” 140. 89. Ricoeur, “Sanction, Rehabilitation,” 132. 90. Ricoeur, “Sanction, Rehabilitation,” 142. 91. Ricoeur, “Justice,” 230. 92. Ricoeur, “Justice,” 230. 93. Ricoeur, “Justice,” 230. 94. Ricoeur, “Justice,” 230. 95. Ricoeur, “Sanction,” 140. 96. Ricoeur, “Sanction,” 140, emphasis added. 97. Ricoeur, “Sanction,” 141. 98. Ricoeur, “Sanction,” 142. 99. Ricoeur, “Sanction,” 141. 100. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Harcourt, 1949), 264. 101. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1991), 157. For a critical discussion of Foucault and writing courses in prison, see Bidhan Chandra Roy, “Words Uncaged: A Dialogical Approach to Empowering Voices” in Joe Lockard and Sherry RankinsRobertson, eds., Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018), 32–48.

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102. See Reagan, Paul Ricoeur, 38; Kemp, “Ricoeur and Education,” 181, 193; and Tomás Domingo Moratalla, “Application: Between Hermeneutics and Education. Paul Ricoeur’s Perspective,” Studia Paedagogica Ignatiana 18, no. 97 (April 2016): 99. 103. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 75. 104. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 84. 105. Ricoeur, 80, emphasis added. 106. Ricoeur, 80. 107. Ricoeur, 80. 108. Ricoeur, 80. 109. Bernard P. Dauenhauer, “Ricoeur and Political Theory: Liberalism and Communitarianism,” in Scott Davidson, ed., Ricoeur across the Disciplines (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 109. 110. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 80, 84. 111. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 82. 112. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 82, emphasis added. 113. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 82. 114. Ricoeur, “Subject of Rights,” 10. 115. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 81. 116. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 89, emphasis added. 117. While the judge facilitates that just distance in the criminal justice system, a teacher does so in education. Ricoeur’s esteem for education can be seen in a passing—and, I would add, stunningly idealistic—remark he makes about teaching: “The teacher-disciple relation is the one external relation that does not imply either a pact of servitude or one of domination” (Ricoeur, 84, emphasis added). 118. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 81. 119. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 80. 120. Ricoeur, “Addressee,” 272. 121. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 88. 122. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 88. 123. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 88. 124. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 81. 125. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 81. 126. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 80. 127. Ricoeur, Course, 144, emphasis added. 128. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 86. 129. Nussbaum, Creating, 21. 130. Ricoeur, “Autonomy,” 75. 131. To be clear, that fact in no way lessens the responsibility institutions of higher education or other societal institutions have to play their part. 132. Ricoeur, “Epilogue,” 290. 133. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 134. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 17. 135. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 147.

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136. Ricoeur, “Justice,” 224. 137. Ricoeur, “Sanction,” 138. I thank my colleague Kelly Brotzman and my former students for introducing me to the joys, challenges, and responsibilities of teaching and learning in prison.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Dauenhauer, Bernard P. “Ricoeur and Political Theory: Liberalism and Communitarianism.” In Ricoeur across the Disciplines. Edited by Scott Davidson, 102–122. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Davidson, Scott, ed. Ricoeur across the Disciplines. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Deneulin, Séverine, Mathias Nebel, and Nichola Sagovsky, eds. Transforming Unjust Structures: The Capability Approach. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2006Dor. Doleac, Jennifer L., and Benjamin Hansen. “Does ‘Ban the Box’ Help or Hurt Low-Skilled Workers? Statistical Discrimination and Employment Outcomes When Criminal Histories are Hidden.” Working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016. Domingo Moratalla, Tomás. “Application: Between Hermeneutics and Education. Paul Ricoeur’s Perspective.” Studia Paedagogica Ignatiana 18, no. 97 (April 2016), 97-114. Farole, Donald J., Jr., and Lynn Langton. “County-based and Local Public Defender Offices, 2007.” Special report, Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, September 2010. https​:/​/ww​​w​.bjs​​.gov/​​conte​​nt​/pu​​b​/pdf​​/clpd​​​o07​.p​​df. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1991. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Goldstein, Joseph, and Marc Santora. “Staten Island Man Died From Chokehold During Arrest, Autopsy Finds.” The New York Times, August 1, 2014. http://nyti​ .ms​/1ohkg8A. Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” In Practical Philosophy. Edited and Translated by Mary J. Gregor, 11–22. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “Critique of Practical Reason.” In Practical Philosophy. Edited and Translated by Mary J. Gregor, 133–171. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “The Metaphysics of Morals.” In Practical Philosophy. Edited and Translated by Mary J. Gregor, 353–603. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Practical Philosophy. Edited and Translated by Mary J. Gregor. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kemp, Peter. “Ricoeur and Education: Ricoeur’s Implied Philosophy of Education.” In Ricoeur across the Disciplines. Edited by Scott Davidson, 181–194. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.

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Lockard, Joe, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson, eds. Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 1981. Narveson, Jan. The Libertarian Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. National Conference of State Legislatures. “Felon Voting Rights.” Nussbaum, Martha C. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2011. O’Neill, Onora. “The Dark Side of Human Rights.” International Affairs 81, no. 2 (March 2005), 427–439. Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Harcourt, 1949. Reagan, Charles E. Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Ricoeur, Paul. “The Addressee of Religion: The Capable Human Being.” In Philosophical Anthropology. Translated by David Pellauer. Vol. 3 of Writings and Lectures, edited by Johann Michel and Jérome Porée, 269–289. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. ———. “Autonomy and Vulnerability.” In Reflections on the Just. Translated by David Pellauer, 72–90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ———. “Capabilities and Rights.” In Séverine Deneulin, Mathias Nebel, and Nichola Sagovsky, eds., Transforming Unjust Structures: The Capability Approach, 17–26. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2006. ———. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Edited by Don Ihde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974. ———. The Course of Recognition. Translated by David Pellauer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. ———. “Epilogue: Personal Capacities and Mutual Recognition.” In Philosophical Anthropology, vol. 3 of Writings and Lectures. Edited by Johann Michel and Jérome Porée, 290–295. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. ———. “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response.” In Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, ed. John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall, 279–290. New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. “Faire l’Université” In Lectures 1: Autour du Politique, 368–379. Paris: Seuil, 1991. ———. “Interpretation of the Myth of Punishment.” In The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Edited by Don Ihde, 354–377. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974. ———. “Introduction.” In Reflections on the Just. Translated by David Pellauer, 1–41. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ———. The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. “Justice and Vengeance.” In Reflections on the Just. Translated by David Pellauer, 223–231. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ———. Lectures 1: Autour du Politique. Paris: Seuil, 1991.

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———. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. Philosophical Anthropology. Translated by David Pellauer. Vol. 3 of Writings and Lectures. Edited by Johann Michel and Jérome Porée. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. ———. Reflections on the Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ———. “Reforme et Revolution dans l’Université.” In Lectures 1: Autour du Politique, 380–397. Paris: Seuil, 1991. ———. “Sanction, Rehabilitation, Pardon.” In The Just. Translated by David Pellauer, 133–145. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. Time and Narrative, vol. 3. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. ———. “Who Is the Subject of Rights?” In The Just. Translated by David Pellauer, 1–10. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Roy, Bidhan Chandra. “Words Uncaged: A Dialogical Approach to Empowering Voices.” In Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers. Edited by Joe Lockard and Sherry Rankins-Robertson, 32–48. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018. Sawyer, Wendy. “How Much Do Incarcerated People Make in Each State?” Prison Policy Initiative, April 10, 2017. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pri​​sonpo​​licy.​​org​/b​​log​/2​​017​/0​​4​​/10/​​ wages​/. Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Random House, 1999. Silverstein, Jason. “Who Was Alton Sterling?” New York Daily News, July 6, 2016. Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Penguin Random House, 2014. Wall, John, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall, eds. Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. New York: Routledge, 2002. Wilbur v. City of Mount Vernon. No. C11-1100RSL, Justia 325 (W.D. Wash. Dec. 4, 2013). https​:/​/ca​​ses​.j​​ustia​​.com/​​feder​​al​/di​​stric​​t​-cou​​rts​/w​​ashin​​gton/​​wawdc​​e​/2​:2011​​ cv011​​00​/17​​6960/​​325​​/0​​.pdf?​​ts​=14​​11609​​061. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Chapter 14

Wounded Memory and a Pedagogy of Hope Engaging Ricoeur within the Context of Conflicting Pasts Robert Vosloo

INTRODUCTION Paul Ricoeur’s monumental work Memory, History, Forgetting provides a thought-provoking section on the uses and abuses of natural memory. Ricoeur is deeply aware of the power and privileged place of memory as an epistemological route to the past, but he is also conscious of the fact that “multiple forms of abuse expose the fundamental vulnerability of memory.”1 Richard Kearney’s comment in On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva is, therefore, in line with the Ricoeurian understanding of the fragility of memory: “Narrative memory is never innocent. It is an ongoing conflict of interpretations: a battlefield of competing meanings. . . . Memory . . . is not always on the side of angels. It can as easily lead to false consciousness and ideological closure as to openness and tolerance.”2 In his discussion of the abuses of memory, Ricoeur distinguishes three levels, namely the pathological-therapeutic level (referred to by Ricoeur as “blocked memory”), the practical level (termed “manipulated memory”), and the ethicopolitical level (or “obligated memory”). I will not go into the detail of Ricoeur’s discussion here,3 but want to call attention to an idea that is emphasized a few times in his discussion. In his description of what he calls wounded memory (according to which the trauma and scars from the past can result in blocked memory)—and after an engagement with two of Freud’s texts, namely “Erinnern, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten” (“Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”) and “Trauer und Melancholie” (“Mourning and Melancholia”)—Ricoeur writes the following: 303

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What we celebrate under the title of founding events are, essentially, acts of violence legitimated after the fact by a precarious state of right. What was glory for some was humiliation for others. To celebration on one side corresponds execration on the other. In this way symbolic wounds calling for healing are stored in the archive of collective memory.4

In our historical experiences, there is thus a paradox of “too much memory here, not enough memory there.”5 This points to the need for doing the difficult work of memory and mourning. One can further note that in his discussion of what he calls manipulated memory (which he places on the practical level), Ricoeur again refers to the different ways in which our collective memory is marked by wounds, this time within his discussion of how the fragility of memory is linked to our quest and demand for identity over against the other that is experience as a threat. In this context, he repeats the idea that the heritage of founding violence marks historical communities, writing (in wording similar to his remark quoted above): “The same events are thus found to signify glory for some, humiliation for others. . . . It is in this way that real and symbolic wounds are stored in the archives of collective memory.”6 I recall this quotation here, and the way it is repeated, because this insight of Ricoeur came to life for me in a very pertinent way when I was teaching a course on South African twentieth-century-church and theological history at the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosch University, with a special focus on the church struggle against apartheid—a class that I had the privilege to teach for several years after my appointment in 2005. Before 2000, the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosch provided theological education almost exclusively for white students preparing for ministry in the Dutch Reformed Church (and the student body consisted for a large part of its history of only male students, since women were only granted access to ministry in the Dutch Reformed Church after 1990). In 2000, students of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern African (URCSA), who previously studied at the University of the Western Cape, joined the theological faculty at Stellenbosch. The Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa was formed in 1994 when the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (with mostly so-called “colored” members) and the largest part of the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa (with mostly black African members) united. The joint theological education meant that students from these churches, which was previously separated along racial lines, now studied at the same institution. In addition, several other denominations too became partners of the faculty soon afterward, and some international students also joined the classes. This greater ecumenicity, racial diversity, and variety of operative understanding

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of identity provided wonderful opportunities for not only thought, conversation, and fellowship but also some severe pedagogical discomfort and challenges. In many of the classes at the faculty, including in the class mentioned that focused on the history of the church in apartheid South Africa, it soon became clear how students from different racial, class, generational, and ecclesial backgrounds had very different intellectual and emotional responses to figures, events, and documents from the past. It was evident that even though there was a common history, this shared history was also a history of ambivalence and division due to South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past. The same figures were heroes for some and villains for others; the same events were seen by some as high points, while for others they pointed to traumatic memories that one should rather forget, and the same documents were interpreted by some as irrelevant or dangerous while others saw them as life-giving and liberating. These experiences testify that the way our memory is marked and often wounded by the past also finds an outlet in academic settings and pedagogical spaces. This raises complex and often highly charged questions concerning the role and responsibility of these institutions in the light of the way a traumatic past is stored in people’s memories and bodies. This implies, or so this essay argues, that it remains an urgent task for such institutions to address challenges related to dealing with the past, including continuing reflection on the ethics of memory and history. In many contexts, these concerns are manifested in the debates on representation, visual redress, restitution, access to digital devices and technology, and the decolonization of the curriculum. Ricoeur famously described the intention of his “little ethics” (as presented in the last part of Oneself as Another) as “aiming at the ‘good life’ lived with and for others, in just institutions.”7 One can therefore ask, with Ricoeur, what does it mean to be a just university, a university that does justice to justice,8 including justice to the past? And what would just pedagogical practices be for institutions that takes its historical embeddedness seriously, also in contexts marked by memories and histories of injustice and suffering, as well as contested historical depictions and receptions of the past? Against this backdrop, and in conversation with Ricoeur’s essay “Memory, History, Oblivion,” I argue for the need to reflect on the hermeneutics of reception through memory as it relates to the embodied and lived suffering of the victims of history. This implies an important shift in which memory is not merely the matrix of history and in service of historiography but also the means through which historical time is reappropriated and experienced— often in troubling and traumatic ways that influence and determine attitudes toward the future. Such an emphasis on the embodied reception of memory highlights the need for an ethics of memory and history that addresses

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questions related to the just allotment of memory, the interwoven nature of shared memory, and an understanding of memory as future-orientated. With this in mind, and with reference to Ricoeur’s distinction between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation as well as the pedagogical vision of the South African theologian and education pioneer Russel Botman, this essay underscores the need for a pedagogy of justice-affirming hope. Such “a pedagogy of just hope” can provide avenues to keep the question of a responsible and just engagement with the past open and transformational. 1. MEMORY AND THE SHIFT TO A HERMENEUTIC OF RECEPTION In March 2003, Ricoeur presented a paper in English at a conference on “Haunting Memories? History in Europe after Authoritarianism” at the Central European University in Budapest under the title “Memory, History, Oblivion.”9 Ricoeur gives in this lecture a critical rereading of his own focus in Memory, History, Forgetting on the writing of history (in line with the lexical definition of historiography). He restates the fact that the argument of Memory, History, Forgetting moved from a discussion on memory (including on the uses and abuses of memory) to history as science (with an emphasis on what he calls, drawing on De Certeau, “the historiographical operation”), to forgetting as threat to recollection and as part of the historical condition of human beings. What Ricoeur proposes in this later paper, however, is an important shift. In his words: What I am proposing today is a shift in the prevailing standpoint, a shift from writing to reading, or, to put it in broader terms, from the literary elaboration of the historical work to its reception, either public or private, along the lines of a hermeneutics of reception. This shift would provide an opportunity to extract, from their linear treatment in the book, some problems which clearly concern the reception of history rather than the writing of history and to emphasize them. The issues at stake concern memory, no longer as a mere matrix of history, but as the reappropriation of the historical past by a memory taught and often wounded by history.10

What are the consequences of this movement toward the reception “of the historical past by a memory taught and often wounded by history”? One initial answer to this question is that problems related to the ethics and politics of memory, such as that of the duty to remember (or forget), falls under this heading of the reappropriation of historical time. Ricoeur further notes that this shift to a more circular movement allows memory to appear twice: first,

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as the matrix of history from the standpoint of historiography, and second, as the reappropriation of the historical past. Such a focus on reception does not mean, however, that one can set aside the phenomenological description of memory (as dealt with at length by Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting). As Ricoeur puts it, “We could not even talk seriously of the reappropriation of the historical past by memory if we had not previously taken into account the enigmas plaguing the process of memory as such.”11 In a similar vein, one can also not escape or skip the epistemological aspects involved in the writing of history, since “the reception of history as a mode of appropriation of the past by memory constitutes the counterpart of the whole process of historiography.”12 But the emphasis on reappropriation implies that memory should not be reduced to be merely a province of history, thus contributing to a fateful break between history and memory. What Ricoeur is interested in is a dialectic of memory and history in which memory is taught by history. Here Ricoeur is especially concerned with the confrontations between (written) testimonies, giving rise to questions such as “Why were they preserved? By whom? For the sake of whom?”13 Ricoeur observes that the conflicting nature of these questions cannot be kept within the boundaries of history as science alone, “but emerges at the level of our contemporary conflicts between living and sometimes collectively organized pleas for a tradition of memory at the expense of other traditional memories.”14 In the last part of his lecture, Ricoeur then turns to some critical issues related to this idea of a memory taught by history, such as the frequent misunderstandings between historians and advocates of memory, the issue of the duty to remember, and the use and abuse of the notion of forgetting. Ricoeur is well aware of the potential clash between historical knowledge and memory. In this context, Ricoeur observes, “Historians should not forget that the citizen is the one who makes actual history—the historian merely tells it—and that they, historians, are also citizens responsible for what they say, especially when their work deals with wounded histories. Memory, then, was not only taught by history, but also wounded by it.”15 For our purposes here, Ricoeur’s remarks on “the duty to remember” is especially important. The claim that one has a duty not to forget is often put forward by the victims of a history of injustice. Ricoeur proposes in this regard, drawing on his earlier readings of Freud, that we “bring together the notion of the duty of memory, which is a moral notion, and those of the work of memory, which are merely psychological notions.”16 This implies for Ricoeur that the critical dimensions associated with historical knowledge are included within the work of memory and mourning. This said, Ricoeur moreover emphasizes that the last word must still belong to the moral duty of memory to do justice to the victims.

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For Ricoeur, it is also important to emphasize that we are not able to remember or tell everything, and that this selective nature of memory and narrative has huge consequences for the reappropriation of the historical past. And in this process the notion of narrative is central. The ideologizations and manipulations of memory, furthermore, rely on procedures of narrative emplotment and reconfiguration that often dispossess social agents of the original power to tell their own story. Accordingly, such dispossession “is responsible for the mixture of abuses of memory and abuses of forgetting, which allows us to speak of too much memory at times, and too much forgetting at other times.”17 But Ricoeur also offers a more positive assessment of narrative configuration—that should also be acknowledged as we reflect on the reception of history through memory—when he ends his paper with a sentence from Isak Dinesen (also quoted by Hannah Arendt in her chapter on “Action” in The Human Condition): “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”18 In my view, these aspects discussed by Ricoeur have important implications for our pedagogy when dealing with conflicting and interwoven pasts, also in tertiary educational settings. Ricoeur’s historical hermeneutic, also as it is elaborated upon after the publication of Memory, History, Forgetting, provides the resources to relate the gains of critical historiography with the central concerns of an ethics of memory and history. What Ricoeur points to, in my view, in “Memory, History, Oblivion” is an amplification of the idea that we should account for the reception of the past through memory in a way that is conscious of the way memory is taught and wounded by history. Hence the need for the centrality of the emphasis on the moral priority of the lived realities of the victims in our engagement with the past. This is in line with his expressed concern: “We need therefore, a kind of parallel history of, let us say, victimisation, which would counter the history of success and victory. To memorize the victims of history—the sufferers, the humiliated, the forgotten—should be a task for all of us.”19 This concern for the victims of history through the writing of history, should in light of Ricoeur’s later concerns thus also be incorporated into a hermeneutic of reception that is sensitive to the those who are wounded by history. In the introduction to the volume Carnal Hermeneutics, the editors Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor also point to the implications of the vital shift implied in Ricoeur’s essay “Memory, History, Oblivion” (the article is published for the first time in English in this volume) since it brings the aspect of “lived suffering” into conversation with notions such as memory, history, and historiography. Although they admit that this essay does not address what they refer to as “carnal hermeneutics” per se, it does motivate why it is necessary, namely “to address the persistence of what Ricoeur calls ‘the wounds left by history’ and the consequent ‘call to justice owed to the victims

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of history.’”20 This emphasis on wounded victims indeed has important implications. In the words of Kearney and Treanor, “These recurring references to wounding represent an important bridge between the standard hermeneutic concerns with writing and reading (texts, narratives, testimonies) and the more carnal significations of the lived body (marked with traces, traumas, scars).”21 A sensitivity for such a hermeneutics of reception seems imperative also in pedagogical contexts in which people engage with their traumatic histories of division and exclusion, as for instance in the light of South Africa’s apartheid past. Ricoeur never fully developed these ideas on a more circular route that points to memory as the reception of the historical part, but his work does suggest, among other things, the need for a thorough engagement with an ethics of memory and history. Some important questions present themselves in this regard, such as whose memories of the past are remembered and privileged? Are we engaging with these memories through a responsible historical epistemology and hermeneutic? With whom are we grappling with our interwoven and often contested constructions of the past? And with what future in mind are we engaging with the past? 2. SHARED MEMORY, THE SPACE OF EXPERIENCE, AND THE HORIZON OF EXPECTATION In the introduction to this essay, I remarked that Ricoeur’s comment that the same event can be experienced as a highpoint in the collective memory of some, while remaining a wound or a scar in the memory of others, struck a chord with me while teaching a class on the church struggle in South Africa against apartheid. Within this context critical historiographical questions arose, such as “Who benefits from, and are hurt by, our dominant accounts of the past?” Hence the African proverb seemed to ring true, “Until the lions have their own historians, tales of history will always glorify the hunter.”22 But it also became clear that one needs an understanding of memory and history (and their interrelation) that is able to negotiate contested and conflicting constructions and reconstructions of the past. This process of grappling together with a shared and divisive past brought home the insight that our histories (and futures) are interwoven. In this regard, the distinction made by Avishai Margalit in his book The Ethics of Memory between a common memory and a shared memory is helpful. Margalit views “common memory” as a notion that “aggregates the memories of all those people who remembers a certain episode which each of them experienced individually.”23 A shared memory, however, is more than merely a collection of the various individual memories held in common

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by a large part of society, but rather “integrates and calibrates the different perspectives of those who remember the episode . . . Shared memory is built on a division of mnemonic labor.”24 In view of this distinction, the challenge remains (for victims and perpetrators, for the subjugated and the privileged, for the affected and the implicated), also in academic settings, to find and create spaces for the kind of mnemonic labor called forth by shared memory. This points toward the need to grapple with the past in proximity to each other and with a consciousness of our interconnectedness. Therefore, hospitality and empathy, rather than an emphasis on security and isolation, are the hermeneutical keys to deal adequately with the past as a past of interwoven pasts. This emphasis on interwoven memories should not be equated with the view that constructs our understanding and articulation of the past merely in combative or competitive terms in which history is a zero-sum game with only winners or losers. In this sense, it is valuable, as Michael Rothberg has argued, that we consider memory as multidirectional. According to such a view memory is subject to “ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing.”25 It is a productive, intercultural dynamic that reaches beyond mere competitive memory. Yet the different ways in which we reappropriate the past through memory (also a historical past taught and wounded by memory), and the way this is experienced and expressed bodily, should be taken with utmost seriousness, especially if we want to do justice to the injustices of the past and its traumatic afterlife. In his article, “Memory, History and Historiography of Congo-Zaïre,” Justin Bisanswa argues in similar vein for what he calls “a memory of crossing,” that is, a mobile way of remembering that crosses borders. A pedagogy that wants to do justice to an interconnected and contested past has much to gain from such a perspective on memory, not merely because it attempts to do justice to interwoven and conflicting memories but also as it testifies to a structural openness toward the future. In Bisanswa’s words: The memory of the crossing rejects the nostalgia of identity issues because the past is the non-achieved whose possibilities are about to hatch. The crossing is not a return to the past but a detour through the past to the future . . . The irony that consists in transgressing and denying one’s launching location transforms itself into hope, for in this move of surpassing oneself something nascent always happens.26

Against the background of this comment, and Ricoeur’s emphasis on a hermeneutics of reception of historical time taught and often wounded by history, it might be fruitful to revisit an aspect of Ricoeur’s work on historical time in

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Time and Narrative 3 (in the chapter “Towards a Hermeneutics of Historical Consciousness”). Here Ricoeur challenges the abstraction of the past as past. We should rather, Ricoeur comments, take account of the “complex interplay of significations that takes place between our expectations directed towards the future and our orientation towards the past.”27 Ricoeur finds in this regard Reinhart Kosseleck’s categories of “space of experience” (referring broadly to the past) and “horizon of expectation” (referring to the future) helpful. Without going into the details of this distinction, one can call attention to the fact that our ethical and political task is “to prevent the tension between these two poles of thinking about history from becoming a schism.”28 This requires for Ricoeur a double imperative. “On the one hand,” Ricoeur says, “we must resist the seduction of purely utopian expectations. They can only make us despair of all action, for lacking an anchorage in experience, they are incapable of forming a practical path directed to the ideals that they situate ‘elsewhere.’”29 This is to say that our horizon of expectation must be kept from running away from us, if it is to give rise to responsible commitments. In this sense it needs to be connected to the present. On the other pole of the tension between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, we must resist the temptation to narrow the space of experience through “the tendency to consider the past only from the angle of what is done, unchangeable and past. We have to open the past, to revivify its unaccomplished, cut-off—even slaughtered—possibilities.”30 For Ricoeur, therefore, it is not merely the future that is open and contingent but also the past. Tomorrow and yesterday, one can say, can always be better (or worse). This can make the present into what Ricoeur calls “the time of initiative—that is, the time when the weight of history that has already been made is deposited, suspended, and interrupted, and when the dream of history yet to be made is transposed into a responsible decision.”31 These remarks of Ricoeur on keeping the tension between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation has implications for our pedagogical spaces and practices when dealing with problems related to a contested and conflicted past. It challenges the dangerous reductionism of utopian visions of the future as well as retrotopian (or nostalgic) and dystopian visions of the past that dislocates us from agency in the present as time of initiative, thus short-circuiting responsible reflection, speech, and action.32 3. TOWARD A PEDAGOGY OF JUST HOPE Earlier in this essay I referred to the challenges related to teaching a class on the history of the church in apartheid South Africa. Given how this history is a history of division, contestation, and intergenerational trauma, it is

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not surprising that class discussions often included responses that expressed denial, pain, frustration, or rage. I remember one incident in which a black student told the class that although they had been together as a racially mixed class for five years, he still does not trust any white people. The white students were immediately on the defensive and pointed to what they thought were established relationships of friendship and mutual trust. This exchange led to a heated debate that made clear the degree in which apartheid’s wounds were still very shallow and raw, not the least because of the fact that unjust structures still determine people’s daily lives, including their educational experiences. The engagement with the memories experienced and transmitted in light of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past thus triggered an emotional and embodied response that indicates the precariousness of pedagogical spaces that is open not only to (conflicting) historiographical accounts of the past but also to how the past is reappropriated in contested ways that displays what Ricoeur calls “wounded memory.” In the specific case mentioned above, the emotional debate about apartheid’s continuing legacy resulted in a moment of catharsis in which the dialogue was not broken off. One of the white students, who was active in the apartheid military system, even felt the need to confess his guilt while kneeling before the other students. These kinds of discussions in academic settings that create time and space to work through memories of the past, also through rigorous debate, are of course unpredictable and risky. The pedagogical practice to dwell on the reception of memory (as argued for above in conversation with Ricoeur) can enable and facilitate a type of social catharsis that may result in words and gestures of confession of guilt, forgiveness, reconciliation, or restitution (as in the case mentioned above). But it can of course have a very different effect too. As Margalit notes, with reference to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “memory breathes revenges as often as it breathes reconciliation, and the hope of reaching catharsis through liberated memories might turn out to be an illusion.”33 Thus we see how easily the tension between the past as the space of experience and the future as a horizon of expectation can become a schism, to use Ricoeur’s terminology (that draws on Kosseleck) mentioned earlier, leading to paralysis rather than action and initiative. This said, it is probably also exactly this risky space that holds much potential to serve as a school for developing clarity as well as empathy, courage as well as discretion; in short, for a pedagogy based on distrust to be countered by a pedagogy of hope. Within the South African context the idea of “a pedagogy of hope” formed part of the educational vision of the South Africa Reformed theologian and public intellectual Russel Botman. Botman, who was influence by the thought of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Latin American liberation theology, was instrumental in the move in 2000 of the Uniting

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Reformed Church in Southern Africa’s theology students and lecturers to Stellenbosch University (referred to in the introduction). A few years later, in 2007, he became rector and vice-chancellor of Stellenbosch University. In his inaugural speech as president of this university, he proposed “a pedagogy of hope” for a multicultural university in Africa.34 Botman takes this notion of a pedagogy of hope over from the work of Paulo Freire, well known for his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (a book, incidentally, that was banned in apartheid South Africa). In Freire’s later book A Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (published in English in 1994), he was concerned about the educational challenges arising in a context of democracy, and proposed for this context a “pedagogy of hope.” For Botman, this idea of a pedagogy of hope seemed particularly suited for South Africa’s young and fragile democracy. Botman linked such a pedagogy of hope especially to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, and before his untimely death in 2014 he also initiated along these lines what was called the “Hope Project” in order to help the various academic faculties to align their work with these commitments.35 Elsewhere Botman reiterates this emphasis on hope as follows: Hope is, or should be, embedded in the skill of teaching and educating. It is a foundation from which the message of possibility over limitations, of opportunity over cynicism, of creation over destruction. Hope is something more than optimism, it is a crucial imperative for the human condition. You cannot have education in the absence of hope.”36

In his inaugural lecture, Botman also stated that this pedagogical commitment to hope should include equitable access to higher education, and that “the developmental agenda must counter the despair of the poor and the illnesses that are so endemic to our country and the larger continent.”37 For Botman, “a pedagogy of hope” (as influenced by Freire) is a critical pedagogy that is linked to the idea that education should have a transformative function in the light of broken realities. As Botman writes, “For the progressive educator, every educational moment—whether in the search of knowledge or the sharing of knowledge or the application of knowledge—is an opportunity to unveil the hope we have for future generations. It is a hope that seeks action and leads to the transformation of the world.”38 One of the features of Botman’s educational vision is indeed that he links hope to agency and transformation. Hope is therefore about redressing the past and about making a better future possible—a future in which “the daughter of the farm worker should have the same opportunity to success as the son of the farm worker.”39 In this sense, one can speak of a pedagogy of just hope

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in which the language of hope is not dislocated from the commitment to the transformation of unequal and unjust structures and institutions. It is of course still a long route from having a formal emphasis on a pedagogy of hope to linking this vision to the real lives of people that have been wounded by the injustices of the past. But this does not negate the fact that in our discussions of pedagogical visions and practices within just educational institutions the importance of the reappropriation of the historical past and its wounds should also include the related emphasis on a horizon of expectation enabling hopeful agency. For such a pedagogy of just hope (as pointed to by Botman following Freire), Ricoeur’s historical hermeneutic can continue to give rise to thought and initiative—also within university settings. NOTES 1. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 57. 2. Richard Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 105. 3. For a more detailed discussion, see Robert Vosloo, Reforming Memory: Essays on South African Church and Theological History (Stellenbosch, South Africa: African Sun Media, 2017), 31–34. 4. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 79. 5. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 79, emphasis original. 6. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 82. 7. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 172, emphasis original. 8. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, The Just (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), ix. 9. See Paul Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” in Carnal Hermeneutics. ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 148–156. 10. Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 148–149. 11. Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 149, emphasis original. For Ricoeur the enigma of memory refers to the fact that it is “of the past,” meaning that it is only present as an absence, as metaphors such as the wax imprint or the trace indicate. But memory is also not deprived of sources when dealing with this enigma. We do not only speak of memory in terms of presence/absence but also in terms of recovery and recollection (what the Greeks called anamnesis). And when this process is successful we speak of recognition, what Ricoeur calls un petit miracle (a little miracle): “Though no longer there, the past is recognized as having been” (Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 150). 12. Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 150. 13. Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 151. 14. Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 151.

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15. Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 154. 16. Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 155. 17. Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 156. 18. Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion,” 156. 19. Paul Ricoeur, “Memory and Forgetting,” in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London; Routledge, 1999), 10, 11. Cf. Maria Duffy, Paul Ricoeur’s Pedagogy of Pardon: A Narrative Theory of Memory and Forgetting (London: Continuum, 2009), 55. 20. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, eds., Carnal Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 5. 21. Kearney and Treanor, Carnal Hermeneutics, 5. 22. Cf. J. C. Adonis, “Kerkgeskiedskrywing in Suid-Afrika: ‘n Kritiese Evaluasie,” Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese 43, no. 1 (March, 2002), 7–21, here 21. 23. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 51. 24. Margalit, Ethics of Memory, 51. 25. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3. 26. Mamadou Diawara, Bernard Lategan, and Jörn Rüsen, eds., Historical Memory in Africa: Dealing with the Past, Reaching for the Future in An Intercultural Context (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 83, 86. 27. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 208. 28. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 215. 29. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 215. 30. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 216. 31. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 208. 32. Cf. Helgard Pretorius and Robert Vosloo, “Heaven is Yesterday: On the Quest for Life Together in the Age of Nostalgia,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 52, no. 3 (2019): 247–264. 33. Margalit, Ethics of Memory, 5. 34. H. Russel Botman, “A Multicultural University and a Pedagogy of Hope in Africa,” speech on the occasion of his installation, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa, April 11, 2007, https​:/​/di​​gital​​.lib.​​sun​.a​​c​.za/​​handl​​e​/100​​​19​ .2/​​4436, accessed November 12, 2019, 3. 35. On the “Hope Project” see Martin Viljoen, “HOPE Project,” chapter 7 in Albert Grundlingh, Ruda Landman, and Nico Koopman, eds., Russel Botman: A Tribute 1953–2014 (Stellenbosch, South Africa: African Sun Media, 2017), 153–174. 36. Russel Botman et al., “A Pedagogy of Hope: Stellenbosch University’s Vision of Higher Education and Sustainable Development,” paper read at the 12th General Conference of the Association of African Universities, Abuja, Nigeria, May 4–9, 2009, https​:/​/di​​gital​​.lib.​​sun​.a​​c​.za/​​handl​​e​/100​​​19​.2/​​4467,​ accessed November 12, 2019. 37. Botman, “Multicultural University,” 6. 38. H. Russel Botman, “Transforming Pedagogical Values,” paper read at the World Innovations Summit for Education, Doha, Qatar, December 7–9, 2010, https​

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:/​/ww​​w​.sun​​.ac​.z​​a​/eng​​lish/​​Docum​​ents/​​Recto​​r​/spe​​eches​​/WISE​​_Onde​​​rwysb​​eraad​​.pdf,​ accessed November 12, 2019, 2. 39. Botman would often use this phrase in his writing and speeches. See, for instance, Russel Botman, “Human Dignity and Economic Globalization,” Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese 45, no. 1 & 2 (2004): 217–327, where he writes: “Broad transformation is itself not a panacea. At some point the realization emerges that it must be followed by deep transformation so that the dignity is restored to those who struggle to make a living in the remotest village of our country. It points to the deepening of equality so that the daughter of the farmer worker would have the same opportunity to success as the son of the farmer” (320).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adonis, J. C. “Kerkgeskiedskrywing in Suid-Afrika: ‘n Kritiese Evaluasie.” Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese 43, no. 1 (March, 2002): 7–21. Botman, Russel. “Human Dignity and Economic Globalization.” Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese 45, no. 1 & 2 (2004): 217–327. Botman, Russel, Arnold van Zyl, Ayesha Fakie, and Christoff Pauw. “A Pedagogy of Hope: Stellenbosch University’s Vision of Higher Education and Sustainable Development.” Paper read at the 12th General Conference of the Association of African Universities, Abuja, Nigeria, May 4–9, 2009. https​:/​/di​​gital​​.lib.​​sun​.a​​c​.za/​​ handl​​e​/100​​1​9​.2/​​4467, accessed November 12, 2019. Botman, H. Russel. “A Multicultural University and a Pedagogy of Hope in Africa.” Speech on the occasion of his installation, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa, April 11, 2007. https​:/​/di​​gital​​.lib.​​sun​.a​​c​.za/​​handl​​e​/100​​​19​.2/​​4436, accessed November 12, 2019. ———. “Transforming Pedagogical Values.” Paper read at the World Innovations Summit for Education, Doha, Qatar, December 7–9, 2010. https​:/​/ww​​w​.sun​​ .ac​.z​​a​/eng​​lish/​​Docum​​ents/​​Recto​​r​/spe​​eches​​/WISE​​_Onde​​​rwysb​​eraad​​.pdf, accessed November 12, 2019. Diawara, Mamadou, Bernard Lategan, and Jörn Rüsen, eds. Historical Memory in Africa: Dealing with the Past, Reaching for the Future in An Intercultural Context. New York: Berghahn, 2010. Duffy, Maria. Paul Ricoeur’s Pedagogy of Pardon: A Narrative Theory of Memory and Forgetting. London: Continuum, 2009. Grundlingh, Albert, Ruda Landman, and Nico Koopman, eds. Russel Botman: A Tribute 1953–2014. Stellenbosch, South Africa: African Sun Media, 2017. Kearney, Richard. On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Kearney, Richard, and Brian Treanor, eds. Carnal Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Kearney, Richard, and Mark Dooley, eds. Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1999.

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Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pretorius, Helgard, and Robert Vosloo. “Heaven is Yesterday: On the Quest for Life Together in the Age of Nostalgia.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 52, no. 3 (2019): 247–264. Ricoeur, Paul. “Memory and Forgetting.” Chapter 1 in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy. Edited by Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, 5–11. London; Routledge, 1999. ———. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ———. “Memory, History, Oblivion.” In Carnal Hermeneutics. Edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, 148–156. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. ———. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. The Just. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. Time and Narrative 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Viljoen, Martin. “HOPE Project.” Chapter 7 in Russel Botman: A Tribute 1953–2014. Edited by Albert Grundlingh, Ruda Landman, and Nico Koopman, 153–174. Stellenbosch, South Africa: African Sun Media, 2017. Vosloo, Robert. Reforming Memory: Essays on South African Church and Theological History. Stellenbosch, South Africa: African Sun Media, 2017.

Index

I. Paul Ricoeur: about, 16 definitions of justice: found between legal and good, 51; tragic, between competing goods (or evils), 22 ethics, xi; little ethic, 123–24, 128, 136; and narrative, 121 hermeneutic arc, 38–40 major texts: “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response,” 98, 115, 188, 278–95; “Experience and Language in Religious Discourse” 213–28; Fallible Man, 97–115; Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 57–72, 237–51; “Ideology and Utopia”, 5, 9, 115; Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, 34–51, 57–72, 77–93; The Just, 6, 22–24; Memory, History, and Forgetting, 23, 253–71, 303–14; Oneself as Another, 17–28, 92, 121– 38, 176–78, 184–88, 237–38, 279– 83, 305; “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” 169–70; “Religious Belief: The Difficult Path of the Religious”

213–28; “The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation.” 20–28, 143–56, 180; Symbolism of Evil, 51, 134; “Tasks of the Political Educator”, 97–98; Time and Narrative, 121–38 methodological concerns: biblical relationship, 16–18, 143; dialectical insights (interpretation involves belonging and distanciation, 141); hermeneutical breakthroughs: (meaning as surplus, 34; showing how “or” becomes “and”, 93); narrative theory, 145; philosophical insights (justice, 6; morality, 15; utopia, 5, 9); philosophical anthropology: conscience, 18–20; between ethical solipsism and extreme passivity, 21; imaginationself-heart, 100, 103; knowingacting-feeling, 100, 103–4; life as a text, 164; question of selfhood, 18 (process of self-affirmation: havingpower-worth, 101) teaching, 16, 97

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Index

II: Selected Authors: Anderson, Pamela Sue, 143, 214 Anselm, 15, 17 Arendt, Hannah, 185, 187–89, 308 Aristotle, 164 Augustine, 124, 126, 137, 226, 232 Baldwin, James, 164–65 Banta, Trudy, 86 Bellah, Robert, 83 bell hooks, 106, 114, 170–71, 175, 270, 292, 294 Bisanswa, Justin, 310 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 15, 23–25, 27, 29, 151, 312 Botman, Russel, 306, 312–14 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 112–13, 168–69, 173–75 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 167 De Certeau, Michael, 306 Descartes, Rene, 18, 121, 137, 144 Dilthey, Ludwig, 77, 80–82, 86 Dinesen, Isak, 308 DuBois, WEB, 106, 118

Kant, Immanuel, 15, 17, 22, 53, 124, 137, 176, 280, 284, 286, 289, 291, 296 Kearney, Richard, 303, 308, 309 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 294 Kosseleck, Reinhart, 311 Lévinas, Emmauel, 15, 18–22, 28–30, 83, 187 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 87–88 MacDonald, Heather, 79 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 92, 138, 295 Margalit, Avishai, 309, 312 Marx, Karl, 122 Nabokov, Vladimir, 166–68 Nagel, Thomas, 290 Narveson, Jan, 285 Nelson, Maggie, 10, 123–39 Nietzsche, Frederick, 121, 122, 137, 169 Nussbaum, Martha, 80, 291 O’Neill, Onora, 285

Foucault, Michel, 288 Freud, Sigmund, 122, 136, 144, 169, 278, 303, 307 Friere, Paolo, 97, 100, 102–9, 313–14

Pelikan, Jarsalov, 167–68 Plato, 151, 258

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 6, 43, 52, 54, 67, 74–75, 77, 80–87, 215–16 Gaitskill, Mary, 108, 113 Greene, Maxine, 4, 5, 97–105

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 74, 80–81, 85, 151 Sen, Amartya, 278, 284 Smith, Zadie, 173, 176

Hegel, 124, 137, 187–89, 283–85, 287, 290 Heidegger, Martin, 84, 85, 164, 180 Homer, 166, 245

Terenzini, Patrick, 239–43, 247–49 Treanor, Brian, 308, 309

Jamison, Leslie, 107–8, 113

Rothberg, Michael, 310

Wallace, David Foster, 107, 113 Whitman, Walt, 163 Wordsworth, William, 173–76

321

Index

III. Major Thematic Concepts: acting: in ethical disobedience, 24; as mother, 132; as part of Greene’s dialectic of freedom, 98–100; as part of creativity, 155; as part of criticality, 57–59, 72; as part of the holistic movement of self, 164, 176; performative and descriptive work of interpretation, 125; as question of narrative identity, 121, 152, 154; in speech, 279, 292–93(interlocutionary, 217; as violence, 54) assessment: of institutions, 199, 227; of learning, 41; as personal judgment, 131, 136, 138, 308; of skills, 77, 86–89 (rubrics for, 88); of teaching, 167, 189, 227; within institutions, 237–50 authentic: qualification for authority, 99, 101, 102, 110; qualification for freedom, 99, 102, 105; standard for assessing skills, 86; type of identity, selfhood or subjectivity, 105, 150, 155–56, 164–65, 175–77; ways of being with others, 186 authority: in classrooms, 99–103, 108–11, 149, 151; corrupt, 101, 108; inner, 25, 100–103; over others, 99, 101, 114, 226; religion as/religious, 58, 220; sources of, 109 autonomy, 43, 50; of objects (content autonomy), 44–45; of persons (moral autonomy), 177–78, 180, 280–81, 288–90; of texts (semantic autonomy), 61, 64, 67, 73; and vulnerability, 281, 288–90 belonging: dialectic relationship with distance/estrangement, 60–62, 74, 84, 141, 154; to inherited traditions, 18, 61; to just institutions, 6; as limitation, 82; in narratives,

150; to social groups, wholes or communities, 25, 103, 105, 152 capability: and capacity, 98–100, 103, 105, 280–81, 288, 292; doubting, 149; through embodiment, 144; as infinite, allowing people to overcome limit-situations, 100, 105; through institutions, 187; as internal skills allowing development, 281; through narrative, 278, 283, 286, 290–93; recognizing or restoring in others, 150, 288 capacity: and capability, 98–100, 103, 105, 280–81, 288, 292; financial, xi, 109; through finitude, 100, 106; for flourishing, xii, 164; hermeneutic, 51, 68, 81; and incapacity, 25, 281; relative to others, 6, 258, 262, 292; relative to self, 20–21, 27, 40, 51, 98, 205, 279–81; of speaking and texts, 46, 127, 172, 216, 279; to think critically, 78; and vulnerability, 281; for witness, 108, 169 dialectics: belonging, and distanciation, 60, 62; and criticality, 59; distanciation and appropriation, 52; explanation and understanding, 38, 49, 57, 63–70, 77; of freedom, 4, 98, 108 (and institutions, 188, 189); legality and goodness, 53; memory and history, 307; reciprocity and excess, 21; of self, 121, 142, 144; self and other, 20, 126, 129–32 disproportion: as determined by social norms, 23, 260; between freedom and desire, 25; between finite capacity and infinite capability, 100 (between knowing, doing, feeling, 107–9); importance for education and development, 106; imposed on others

322

Index

through ideology (second level), 101; relative to incompleteness, 99; structure of fallibility, 103 distance: and belonging, 141, 154; and criticality (distanciation), 60–63; and discourse, 37; distanciation in learning, 89; and hermeneutics, 52, 54, 74, 84; between “I” and “self”, 134; and interpretation, 38, 43; as “just” distance, 287, 290, 291; and note, 12, 68; as productive, 33, 34, 44–48, 57, 85; and relationships, 126, 198; as social distancing, xii, 33, 34, 51, 186; from social norms, 150; temporal, 155; and texts, 88 embody: authority, 99; communication, 39; diversity, 153; otherness, 18; prejudice, 222; queerness, 129, 133; religious symbol, 154; site of selfawareness, 143, 176; virtues, 3, 8, 10, 106, 173, 200; wounds, 309 fragile: achievements, 214, 217; attestation, 280; capacity’s shadow, 281–82; compromises, 22; democracy, 313; foundations, 106; human, 108, 113; memory, 303–4; obligated to, 187; possibilities, 1 hermeneutics: arc, 85, 173, 246; dialectic of: (explanation (erklären), 38, 244–50 {from guess to validation, 86; from direct communication to structural distance, 87}; interpretation, 36, 85, 241–47 {fusion of horizons, 43, 54, 67, 70, 74, 75; hospitality, 43–51, 171, 214, 216, 227, 229, 235, 310; literal, 39, 43, 53, 131, 134, 215; productive distance, 43}; prefiguration, configuration, reconfiguration, refiguration, 63–64, 71, 142, 145, 215–16, 308; pre-understanding, 246, 250; suspicion, 68–72, 82,

122–25, 128, 136–38, 147, 280; understanding (verstehen), 38, 244– 50; understanding and explanation, 38, 49–50, 63–65, 67–69, 85, 239, 242–50, 251n5; understanding and application as appropriation, 35; appropriation, 61–62, 64, 68, 70, 71–72 {in criticality, 10, 57–58, 60–61, 64, 67–72; as hermeneutic process, 52, 54, 75; as learning, 35; and reappropriating the past, 306–8, 314; expansion of reader, 40, 48; as integration of skill and content, 93; as sympathetic adoption, 216; transferable skills, 77, 80, 85–93}; rubrics in evaluation, 89); types of hermeneutics (carnal hermeneutics, 308–9; philosophical hermeneutics, 244; retrieval and suspicion, 69, 123, 128; reception, 306, 307, 308, 309; romanticist, 81–82); hermeneutical injustice, 294 horizon: of community, inclusive of dissensus, 23, 185; developmental space for liberation, 101, 106, 225; and ethical relations, 205; of expectation, 306, 309, 311; framed by historical situatedness, 62; and gadamerian fusion, 43, 54, 61, 67, 74–75, 85, 217; interwoven, 176; of potential meanings, 47, 65; opened by object, 50, 68; shared world, 81 hospitality, 44–47; and empathy, 310; interpretative, 34, 43–48, 50–51; linguistic, 216; religious, 214, 227; toward others, 171 humanities, x, xii, 5, 57–58, 60, 77, 97, 99, 141–42, 146, 150, 151, 193–96, 205; content defense, 79–80, 90–91 imagination: and community, 151; and dialogue, 133; and embodied self, 144; and education, 99, 141–42, 156, 189, 220, 223; and empathy, 7, 173, 216; future, 4, 8, 240; and good

Index

life, 16; and humanities, 79; and just university, 7, 237; and knowing, 100–15; and literary self, 164; and memory, 254, 257; moral, 5, 202 (Rawls); and poetic reason, 174; as social imaginary, 2, 178, 218–19; value, 193; and variations, 16, 68, 75, 265 imputation, 115, 121, 188, 198, 279, 280, 282, 283, 285, 290, 294 inclusion: deliberately inclusive, 226–27; Inclusion, 192, 221–24; inclusivity and fairness, 41; religious, 213–16 institutions: academic (as business or corporation: ix, 8, 16, 26–27, 77–78, 114, 168, 191, 237; classrooms and courses, 33–51, 91–93, 109, 130, 186, 258; as communities, 51; community colleges, x, 195, 203, Kirkwood Community College, 268–69; college and universities as higher education, 78, 107, 109, 122, 124, 141, 148, 164, 166, 171, 183, 189, 192, 200, 205, 210, 213, 218–28, 238, 264, 267, 270–71, 291; college within university structure, 38; and economics, 263, 265; History of higher education: American colonial, 255–57, California Master Plan, 192–205{ G.I. Bill, 260, Nineteenth-century, 258, state college system, 195}; Junior college, 195; offered in prisons, 277–93; Predatory, 218; Research universities as institutions, 239, 241; Religiouslyaffiliated, 213, 218, 220, 227; And rural, low-income students, 265–68; Specific Institutions: Art Institute of Chicago, 254, 265; Fresno Pacific University, 58 {Harvard University, 254–55; L’université de l’oflag, 277; Nanterre, 277; Northern Illinois University, 254; Oberlin College, 258; Sorbonne, 277;

323

Stellenbosch University, 304, 313; Swarthmore College, 15, 26–27; University of California system, 195–205; University of Chicago, 16; University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, 264; University of Iowa, 262; University of Minnesota, 156; Uppsala University, ix}; Twentieth-century, 259; University as institution, 2–10); accreditation, xii, 10, 38, 213, 217–20, 223–24, 237, 240 (national standards, 218); carceral, 278–95; criminal justice, 4, 78, 197, 278, 282, 286–87, 290, 299; democracy, 6, 59, 80, 98, 114, 186, 194, 210, 255, 257, 260, 313; economic: ix–xii, 1–4, 8–9, 26–27, 98–99, 109, 152, 166–67, 193, 201, 208, 210, 254, 258, 261–62, 267, 270; religious (Dutch Reformed Church, 304; United Methodist Church, 222–24; Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa, 304, 312–13) intelligence: contextual intelligence, 243; issues intelligence, 240–41; organizational/social intelligence, 239–43; technical/analytical intelligence, 240, 247 just university, ix–xii, 1–11, 16, 26–27, 93, 97, 106, 110, 114, 115, 121–25, 138, 141, 164–68, 173, 176–78, 205–6, 237, 243, 249, 267, 305; and just pedagogy, 34, 40–48, 51, 54 memory: abuses of memory, 303; collective memory, 256, 269–71, 304, 309; common memory, 309–10; ethics of memory, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309; interwoven memories, 310; multidirectional memory, 310; shared memory, 309–10; vulnerability of memory, 303; wounded memory, 303, 312

324

Index

moral: action, 20, 25; agency, 5–7, 185; aims, 257; ambiguity, 190; anchor, 188; aptitude, 256; bankruptcy, 27; character, 80; concern, 199; conduct, 167; conflict, 22; and criticality, 59; culpability, 6; development, 34; dimension, 184, 197–98, 200; duty, 307; equals, 292; fitness, 258; framework, 282–83; God, 170; goodness, 53; happiness, 106; heart, 28; imagination, 5; imperative, 201; instruction, 257; judgment, 23–24; and language, 124; life, 17, 25; norms, 189, 238; philosophy, 18; practices, 246; priority, 308; problems, 192, 198, 205; reform, 258; relations, 187, 200; relativism, 177; resources, 294; responsibility, 280, 289–90; self, 19, 26; sense, 75, 178; status, 295; subject, 21–22, 121; theory, 186; thinking, 15; wisdom, 24 narrative: narrative capability, 278, 283, 286, 290–93; narrative construction, 141–42, 145–46; narrative identity, 121, 124, 142, 146, 150, 156, 282, 286, 289, 290; pedagogical narrative, 154; transcontextual narrative, 145, 153, 155 narrative identity, 121, 124, 142, 145– 52, 156, 164, 282, 286–92 pedagogy, 62–63, 64, 65–66, 70–71; co-learning, 293; fallible pedagogy, 99, 100–101, 103, 105–6, 109, 113, 115; just pedagogy, 34, 40–43; oppressed, 100, 313; pedagogy of hope, 306, 311, 312, 313, 314; of sentencing, 288 personal identity, 268, 289 phenomenology, 82, 122, 136, 141, 143, 173, 176, 214; of the I can, 278; of memory, 253

Phronesis, 15, 16, 21, 184, 204 questions: as collaboration, 45–47; inquiry, 44; questioning, 216–17, 224–26; questions of meaning and purpose, 222, 224–25; recurring, 48; teaching with questions, 47–50 recognition: as a course, 292; and love, 126; mediated by institutions, 189, 191, 199, 200, 202, 222, 284, 290, 291, 294; mutual recognition, 51, 136–37, 170, 293; of others, 187, 188, 278, 283, 284, 286–87; of past’s influence, 62, 314; self-recognition, 142–44, 150–51, 153, 155–56, 284 rights: human rights, 150, 262, 285; negative rights, 285; political rights, 285; positive rights, 284–85; rights to capabilities, 291; social rights, 285 self, 237; capable, 188–90, 198– 99, 201–5; competent, 156; embodiedness, 158; kenotic, 169; liminal, 154; literary, 164–65, 173–78; nostalgic, 165–69; queered, 124; seeing and being seen, 5–6, 62, 148, 156, 175; self-designation, 279; self-esteem, 238; selfhood, 6, 15, 18, 20, 26, 122, 131, 164, 174, 176–77; self-understanding, 10, 15, 68–70, 72, 127, 143, 145, 150, 214, 246; summon/summoned, 5, 105, 142, 152–53, 156 society, x, 4–7, 9–10, 26, 59–60, 72, 89, 98, 145, 256, 261, 278, 282, 290–91, 294, 310; consumer, 98; democratic, 194, 260; family in, 127; just, 91–92; norm of, 287; protection of, 286–87 thinking, 131, 152–56, 241–42, 283; autonomous, 176; binary, 132; charitable, 294; creative, x, xii, 4, 108, 111–13; critical, 111, 114,

Index

122, 137–38 (critical action, 64, 67, 69, 71; critical being, 60, 63, 64, 67, 69–70, 71; critical cognitive skills, 60, 64, 65–66, 69, 70; critical dispositions, 60, 62–63, 66–67, 68, 69–71189, 194, 199; critical inquiry, 221, 224–25, 227; criticality, defined, 59–60); religious, 151; self, 144 transformation: content, 3; through criticality, 71; and development, 100–101; of focus, 166, 190; into hope, 310; into information, 240–42; personal, 34, 40, 42–44, 48, 142, 143, 154, 279, 292 ( through appropriation, 72); practical, 5, 286; of questions, 217, 306; through settler colonialism, 257; of social world, 8, 9, 59, 103, 104, 165; of symbols, 215; of text, 129; transformative pedagogy, 10; of university and education, 11, 114, 116, 277, 313; of workplace, 91

325

translation, 215–16, 225–26, 278, 292; language, 215–16 truth, 27, 77, 80, 84–85, 93, 111, 122, 150, 153, 168–69, 172, 174, 198; Christian, 15; claims of, 246; communal, 15; historical, 253; Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 312; unconditioned, 214–15; universal, 215 vulnerability: as an alternative to power, 172; and attestation, 176; and autonomy, 281, 288–89; awareness of, 104; and capability, 278, 292; and higher education, 200–201, 203, 277; and imputation, 280; to injustice, 199; of inquiry, 106; institutionally created, 187, 198; and literary selves, 174; and memories, 262, 303; of Potentialities, 103.; in public disclosure, 131; and sincerity, 291; as subjects, 285; witnessing, 108

IV. Other Concepts: adequation, 144 alterity, 18, 24, 164, 177, 184 apartheid, 305, 309, 311 apathetic, 226–27 apodicticity, 17, 144, 147, 155, 249 being-in-the-world, 64, 67, 70–72 best practices, 219 bias: in pedagogy, 41 Bible: book, 149, 228; and narratives, 143, 155; Ricoeur and, 15–22; teaching, 57–58, 64–71, 255–56 called: by conscience, 18; by God, 19, 171, 224; in narrative construction, 144–45; by others, 151, 165, 310 charity, 24, 45, 122, 136, 138, 187 communitarianism, 178, 289

conscience, 15, 18–25, 27–28, 180 context: contextual intelligence, 241–42, 247; transcontextual narratives, 145, 153, 155, 156 Coronavirus/COVID–19, 33, 51 course delivery, 34, 41, 51; synchronous/asynchronous, 47 curriculum, 8, 77–78, 90–92, 169–71, 222, 237, 255–58, 265, 283, 305 development, 34, 47, 57, 59–64, 70–72, 81, 86, 100–101, 106, 126, 142, 185– 89, 202, 205, 241, 255, 259, 313 disclosure (of texts), 10, 53, 62, 67–72 discourse, 19–20, 36–37, 44, 47, 62, 64–65, 67, 70; in classrooms, 37; religious, 20; as a work, 36 discrimination, 149, 155, 169, 223–24

326

Index

dispossession of ego, 63, 68, 70 emplotment, 142, 145, 308 epistemology, 11, 81–83, 116, 141, 145, 150, 215, 303, 307, 309 ethics: charity, 45–46; ethics, 237, 242, 246, 249–50; hospitality, 44–47; solicitude, 238, 242 experience: space of experience, 306, 309, 311 explanation. See hermeneutics faith: after atheism, 169–70; communities, 7; religious, 17–19, 58, 71, 123–24, 216, 222, 224; and tradition, 167–68 federal aid, 218, 220, 227, 240, 259 fossil fuels divestment movement, 15 happiness, 100, 102, 104–6, 108, 112, 126, 202, 259; eudaimonia, 226; flourishing, xi, 7, 34, 43, 58, 103, 154, 164–73, 189–92, 195, 205, 224– 26; phronesis, 15, 16, 21, 184, 204 heteronormative, 105, 126, 128, 223 higher education, access to, 261, 263 history: higher education, history of, 255–59; historical consciousness, 60–66, 70, 72 individualism, 81–82, 186 inequality, 100–102, 183 inquiry. See questions intelligence: issues intelligence, 240–41; organizational intelligence, 239–43; technical/analytical intelligence, 240, 247 justice, 91, 93, 237–38, 242, 246; as pedagogy, 34, 40–43 language: translation, 215–16 learning, 35, 42 learning objectives, 40

legitimation, 219–20; academic institutional, 219, 220; through power-in-common, 186, 190 liberal arts, 224–27, 250 liberalism, 201, 285 liberation, 3, 97, 99–101, 104, 106, 110, 112–15, 146, 245, 312 literature: ix, 90, 97, 99, 107, 175, 178, 191, 194, 197, 205 metaphor, 39 mimesis: mimetic rivalry, 214 money: federal aid, 218, 220 misinterpretation, 44 myth: myth of babel, 214–16; and symbols, 214–15; multiplicity, 216 objectivity, 245–46 organizations: Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC & U), 78, 79, 84–85, 91; NACE, 79; Strada Institute, 78 passing, 267 philosophy: philosophy of science, 245 pluralism, 227 poetics: poetics of the good, 216; poetics of the will, 25 practices, 83, 86, 87, 90–92 predatory colleges and universities, 218 prejudice, 221–22 prisons, 277–78, 287–88, 291–94 productivity, 44 progress, 7, 131, 178, 216, 261; progressive, xi, 9, 183, 225, 313; progressivism, 258 psychology, 2, 81–82, 225, 278; psychologism, 82; psychology, 82, 83 reading, 45, 50; with charity, 45–46 recognition: self recognition, 284; mutual recognition, 51, 284, 286, 293

Index

relevance, 46, 51 religion: religions as languages, 213–16, 222, 225; religious literacy, 222; religious minorities, 220 resource, 5–6, 214, 239, 263 rural, 254, 262–65, 267–69 science: social/human science, 240, 245; natural science, 245–46 sensus communis, 23, 27 skills: hard, 78; soft, 78–79, 81–84; transferable, 78–79, 84–86, 93 South Africa, 303, 304, 311 speech, 167, 175, 216, 244–45, 258, 279–81, 292, 311–13 spirit, 6, 44–45, 91, 188, 250; spiritual shoppers, 221 striving, 214

327

structures: pervasive structures of religious privilege, 220, 222, 224; University structure, 37–38 surplus, 34, 51, 216; surplus meaning, 34, 38–44, 48 syllabus, xii, 10, 34, 41, 47–48, 99, 269 symbolic order, 189, 280, 282, 289–91, 293–94 synthesis, 22, 84, 93, 100, 106, 109, 111, 194, 214 technology, 8, 78, 81–82, 98, 240, 242, 305 texts, 243–45; world of text, 61–62, 64, 67–68, 70, 71 time, 46–47 understanding. See hermeneutics

Contributors

Daniel Boscaljon (PhD, University of Iowa) holds a PhD in religious studies and a PhD in English. His work emerges at the intersection of radical theology and humanism. In addition to Vigilant Faith (University of Virginia Press, 2013), Daniel has collaborated on a number of edited volumes including Teaching Religion and Literature (Routledge, 2018). He has most recently completed a series of articles on Idolatrous Masculinity and Idolatrous Whiteness, published in the “On Film” section of Religious Studies Review and is working on a book exploring a theologically agnostic approach to sacred texts. Michael Le Chevallier (PhD, University of Chicago) is the associate director of the Lumen Christi Institute in Chicago. He graduated with a PhD in Theological Ethics from the University of Chicago Divinity School, writing a dissertation on institutional ethics in Paul Ricoeur and Catholic Social Thought. He is the coeditor of Jean Bethke Elshtain: Politics, Ethics, and Society (Notre Dame Press, 2018). Nathan Eric Dickman (PhD, University of Iowa) is an assistant professor of philosophy at University of the Ozarks. He researches in hermeneutic phenomenology, philosophy of language, and comparative questions in philosophy of religions. He teaches a wide range of courses, such as Critical Thinking, Islam, Ethics, and the Historical Jesus. His Using Questions to Think (Bloomsbury) examines the roles questions play in critical thinking and reasoning, and recent articles in Sophia and Religions explore comparative religious cosmologies and feminist philosophies of religions.

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330

Contributors

Verna Marina Ehret (PhD, University of Iowa) is associate professor of religious studies and director of the Evelyn Lincoln Institute for Ethics and Society at Mercyhurst University and holds a PhD in modern religious thought. Her primary fields of study are philosophical and constructive theology, focusing her teaching and scholarship on the interaction of religion and society. Recent publications include “Religion Is Not Violent: Tillich, Anxiety and the Politics of Religious Violence” forthcoming in The Political Theology of Paul Tillich from Lexington Books, “Contemporary Religious changes in the U.S.: Responses to the Fracturing of Religious Life” in Religions (2019), and “Imago Dei to Ciphers of Transcendence: Narrative Theology of the Integrity of Life” in the Journal of Religion and Theology (2018). Charles A. Gillespie (PhD, University of Virginia) is a lecturer in the Department of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University. His research and teaching investigate religions, the arts, and culture with a focus on Christian thought, aesthetics, interpretation theory, and theater and performance studies. In addition to conference presentations in the United States and Europe, his work has been published in Theatre Symposium and Union Seminary Quarterly Review and he is coeditor of the special issue of the journal Religions on “Religion and Theatrical Drama.” Jeffrey F. Keuss (PhD, University of Glasgow, Scotland) is professor of Christian ministry, theology, and culture at Seattle Pacific University. His research interests continue to be located at the intersection of literature and theology, theological and cultural hermeneutics, and the interplay of continental philosophy and theology with attention to the work of Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion and Walter Brueggemann. He has served as senior lecturer of practical theology and director for the Centre of Literature, Theology and the Arts at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, as well as the founding chair of the Paul Ricoeur Seminar of the American Academy of Religion and Editor for Literature and Theology (OUP). He is the author of A Poetics of Jesus: The Search for Christ in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Routledge, 2018), The Sacred and the Profane: Current Demands in Hermeneutics (Routledge, 2017), and Freedom of the Self: Kenosis, Cultural Identity and Mission at the Crossroads (Pickwick, 2010). Howard Pickett (PhD, University of Virginia) is associate professor of ethics and poverty studies and director of the Shepherd Program for the Interdisciplinary Study of Poverty and Human Capability at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. He teaches courses at the Augusta Correctional Center in Craigsville, Virginia. He is the author of Rethinking Sincerity and Authenticity: The Ethics of Theatricality in Kant, Kierkegaard, and Levinas (University of Virginia Press, 2017).

Contributors

331

Kenneth A. Reynhout (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) is the director of Institutional Effectiveness, Assessment, and Research at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has taught at Bethel University, the College of New Jersey, and United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. He is the author of Interdisciplinary Interpretation: Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Theology and Science (Lexington, 2013). Richard A. Rosengarten (PhD, University of Chicago) is associate professor of religion, literature, and visual culture at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he also holds an appointment in the college. He is the author of Narrating Providence: Divine Design and the Incursions of Evil (Palgrave/ MacMillan), and is completing a book on Roman Catholicism, the Eucharist, and modernity, Styles of Catholicism: Flannery O’Connor, Frida Kahlo, Simone Weil. Laura Schmidt Roberts (PhD, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley) is professor of biblical and theological studies at Fresno Pacific University. Research interests range from Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, theological anthropology, ecotheology and environmental ethics, to applications of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutics. Recent publications include “Refiguration, Configuration: Tradition, Text, and Narrative Identity,” in Recovering from the Anabaptist Vision: New Essays in Anabaptist Identity and Theological Method, ed. Laura Schmidt Roberts, et al., T&T Clark Studies in Anabaptist Theology and Ethics, February 2020; “Reconceiving Human Creatureliness,” Direction 49, no. 1 (spring 2020); “The Theological Place of Land: Watershed Discipleship as Re-placed Cultural Vision,” in Rooted and Grounded: Essays on Land and Christian Discipleship, eds. Ryan D. Harker and Janeen Bertsche Johnson (Pickwick Publications, 2016). Vero Rose Smith (MDesS, Harvard University Graduate School of Design) cares about people and the places people live. Smith’s work centers climate change and the economic and historical circumstances that built inequality into our everyday. As an artist, Smith interprets environmental data into image and sound. As a curator, Smith produces community-focused exhibitions and participatory events that investigate histories of retail, land use, and the built world. In the classroom, Smith guides learners in creating their own frameworks and methodologies for lifelong exploration. Smith holds a Master’s of Design Studies in Art, Design, and the Public Domain from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a Master’s of Arts in Architectural History from the University of Iowa, and a Master’s of Business Administration from Quantic Institute of Business and Technology. Her publications include “New Geographies and Creative Placemaking in the Classroom,” Future Forward, 6, no. 1 (March 2019), 26–44 and guest editor

332

Contributors

for special issue of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding, July 2018. Robert Vosloo (PhD, University of Western Cape) is professor in Systematic Theology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. In addition, he is the editor of the Stellenbosch Theological Journal and a senior researcher in the Beyers Naudé Center for Public Theology. His recent publications include Reading Bonhoeffer in South Africa After the Transition to Democracy: Selected Essays, co-authored with Nico Koopman (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2020) and Reforming Memory: Essays on South African Church and Theological History (Stellenbosch: Sun Media, 2017). His academic research focuses on topics such as 20th century South African church and theological history, philosophical and theological discourses on hospitality and recognition, the thought of Paul Ricoeur, and the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Mark I. Wallace (PhD, University of Chicago) is professor of religion, environmental studies, and interpretation theory at Swarthmore College. At Swarthmore, he directs the ChesterSemester program in which college students work alongside Chester, Pennsylvania, city partners in high-value internships focused on social and environmental justice. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Japan International Christian University, and is core faculty for the U.S. State Department’s Institutes on Religious Pluralism at Temple University. Recent books include When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World (Fordham University Press, 2019), awarded the 2019 Nautilus Gold Award for best book in Western religious thought; Green Christianity: Five Ways to a Sustainable Future (Fortress, 2010); and Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature (Fortress, 2005). His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Academy of Religion, and the National Endowment of the Humanities. Glenn Whitehouse (PhD, University of Iowa) is associate dean of Arts & Sciences and associate professor of philosophy and religion at Florida Gulf Coast University. His research has focused on Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, religion and popular culture, and religion and humanism. At FGCU he directs and cofounded the PAGES Program, a career program for humanities and social science students. His administrative work is focused on student issues and programs, transferable skill assessment, and liberal arts advocacy.